For embedded system designers, if there are preliminary simulation tests on the hardware IC evaluation or software development process before the project is started, this will greatly increase the stability of the system design in the later period, shorten the development cycle, and reduce the development cost of the budget.This article describes how to use the RF evaluation tool SmartRF Studio from Texas Instruments to quickly develop the CC1310.
1. A brief introduction to CC1310
1.1 Basic characteristics
The CC1310 is a cost-effective, ultra-low power SUB-1GHz RF device in the Texas Instruments CC26xx and CC13xx series devices. Its active RF and microcontroller (MCU) have very low current consumption, it also has a flexible variety of low power modes to ensure excellent battery life, suitable for remote operation powered by a small coin cell battery Energy harvesting applications
The CC1310 is the first device in the sub-1GHz family of cost-effective, ultra-low-power wireless MCUs supporting multiple physical layer and RF-standard platforms, and combine a flexible ultra-low-power RF transceiver with a powerful 48MHz Cortex®-M3 microcontroller.Its dedicated wireless controller (Cortex®-M0) handles low-level RF protocol commands stored in ROM or RAM, ensuring ultra-low power consumption and flexibility. The CC1310 device also has excellent sensitivity and stability (selectivity and blocking) performance.
The CC1310 device is a highly integrated, true monolithic solution that integrates a complete RF system with an on-chip DC-DC converter.
The sensor can be processed in a very low-power mode by a dedicated ultra-low-power autonomous MCU that can be configured to handle analog and digital sensors, so the main MCU (Cortex-M3) can maximize the sleeping time.
The CC1310 power and clock management and wireless systems require specific configurations and are handled by software to operate correctly, all of which have been implemented in TI-RTOS. TI recommends that this software framework be applied to the entire application development process for the device. The complete TI-RTOS and device drivers are provided free of charge in source code form.
1.2 On chip resources
Powerful ARM® Cortex®-M3 processor
Up to 48MHz clock rate
128KB In-System Programmable Flash Memory
8KB Static Random-Access Memory
Ultra-low power sensor controller
On-chip internal DC-DC converter
2 Synchronous Serial Interfaces (SSI) (SPI, MICROWIRE, and TI)
Integrated temperature sensor
2. SmartRF Studio
Smart RF Studio is a Windows application for evaluating and configuring Texas Instruments' low-power RF ICs.This tool is very useful for exploring and understanding RF-IC products. The software will help designers of RF systems to easily evaluate RF-IC during the early stages of the design process.It is particularly useful for generating configuration registers, actually testing RF systems, and searching optimized external component values.
3. SmartRFStudio7 and CC1310
3.1 Using SmartRFStudio7 Simulation
Before the simulation, you first need to download the configuration tool SmartRF Studio7, the latest version has been updated to V2.6.0.
Download link: www.ti.com. After SmartRFStudio7 is downloaded and installed, we connect the hardware device (here the LanunchPad development board) to the computer through the emulator, open SmartRF Studio7, the device is connected well, as shown in the figure:
Double-click the CC1310 icon to open the configuration simulation interface. First select the simulation parameters, default 50kbps (airspeed), 2-GFSK (modulation method), and 25k deviation (frequency offset) as shown in the figure below:
After setting up according to the above figure, connect the other board to the computer in the same way and set the same RF parameters. One is to click on Packet TX and Start button in the lower right corner, then the other board is to click on the Packet RX page and Start button in the lower right corner you can see the data from the sending board has been received in the receiving board.
Using this simulation process, you can use the spectrum analyzer to view the transmission of RF information. When the hardware is been developed, you can use this tool to test and verify the RF hardware performance, including the RF power parameters such as transmitting power, receiving sensitivity, and second harmonics.
3.2 Software development parameter configuration
In addition to the SmartRF Studio simulation, the CC1310 module can also be used to configure RF chip software development registers or command parameters. Open SmartRF Studio 7, click the CC1310 icon,We modify the default RF parameters to:
Frequency 915Mhz
Airdata rate 10K
Frequency offset 19K;
Receive bandwidth 78K;
Transmission power 12dBm;
Others default, software configuration as shown:
After above configuration completing, click on the "Code Export" command window to save the generated "smartrf_setting.c" and "smartrf_setting.h" to the path of the software development project. Replace the original smartrf_setting.c and smartrf_setting.h files and recompile. The new project is already just configured RF parameters.
Using SmartRF Studio 7 command software parameter configuration can help developers quickly grasp the register or chip command settings, convenient and simple, compared to the configuration by yourself, it can save more time, high efficiency and no error rate. If the user is forced to configure invalid values for certain commands, the tool will also give a warning, very smart.
4. Product solution
The E70/E71 series are a wireless serial port module (UART) based on TI's CC1310 radio frequency chip from Chengdu Ebyte, TTL level output.The series of powerful modules, there are 7 kinds of work modes, to meet most of the current wireless data transmission application scenarios, its main features are as follows:
Ultra-low power consumption: Receiving current is only 8mA, sleeping current is only 1uA.
Fixed-point transmission: supporting address function, the host can transmit data to the module with any address, any channel, to achieve hoc network, relay and other applications.
Broadcast monitoring: After the module address is set as the broadcast address, it can monitor the data transmission of all modules on the same channel; the sent data can be received by any module on the same channel.
Forward error correction: The module has a software FEC forward error correction algorithm.
Parameter save: After users setting the parameters, the module parameters will be saved and not be lost even power off, and the module will work according to the parameters after power on again.
Ultra-small size: The size of this module is only less than 1/2 of the size of the same type module. It is highly recommended for cases with strict size restrictions.
Secondary development: All the IOs for customers to do secondary development and supporting customized requirements.
Series complete: 433M, 868M, 915M different frequency bands, 4x4, 7x7 different packages, 14dBm, 30dBm power level.
