Arduino Due

Overview

The arduino_due board configuration is used by Zephyr applications that run on the Arduino Due board. It provides support for the Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU and the following devices:

• Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC)

• System Tick System Clock (SYSTICK)

• Serial Port over USB (ATMEL_SAM3)

More information about the board can be found at the Arduino Due website. The Atmel SAM3X8E Datasheet has the information and the datasheet about the processor.

Note

This configuration is not supported by Arduino.

Hardware

Supported Features

The arduino_due board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
NVIC	on-chip	nested vectored interrupt controller
SYSTICK	on-chip	system clock
UART	on-chip	serial port
GPIO	on-chip	gpio
I2C	on-chip	i2c
Watchdog	on-chip	watchdog

Other hardware features are not currently supported by the Zephyr kernel. See Arduino Due website and Atmel SAM3X8E Datasheet for a complete list of Arduino Due board hardware features.

The default configuration can be found in the Kconfig boards/arm/arduino_due/arduino_due_defconfig.

Note

For I2C, pull-up resistors are required for using SCL1 and SDA1 (near IO13).

Interrupt Controller

There are 15 fixed exceptions including exceptions 12 (debug monitor) and 15 (SYSTICK) that behave more as interrupts than exceptions. In addition, there can be a variable number of IRQs. Exceptions 7-10 and 13 are reserved. They don’t need handlers.

A Cortex-M3/4-based board uses vectored exceptions. This means each exception calls a handler directly from the vector table.

Handlers are provided for exceptions 1-6, 11-12, and 14-15. The table here identifies the handlers used for each exception.

Exc#	Name	Remarks	Used by Zephyr Kernel
1	Reset		system initialization
2	NMI		system fatal error
3	Hard fault		system fatal error
4	MemManage	MPU fault	system fatal error
5	Bus		system fatal error
6	Usage fault	undefined instruction, or switch attempt to ARM mode	system fatal error
11	SVC		system calls, kernel run-time exceptions, and IRQ offloading
12	Debug monitor		system fatal error
14	PendSV		context switch
15	SYSTICK		system clock

Note

After a reset, all exceptions have a priority of 0. Interrupts cannot run at priority 0 for the interrupt locking mechanism and exception handling to function properly.

System Clock

Arduino Due has two external oscillators/resonators. The slow clock is 32.768 kHz, and the main clock is 12 MHz. The processor can set up PLL to drive the master clock, which can be set as high as 84 MHz.

Serial Port

The Atmel SAM3X8E processor has a single UART that is used by the SAM-BA bootloader. This UART has only two wires for RX/TX and does not have flow control (CTS/RTS) or FIFO. The RX/TX pins are connected to the ATmega16U2, which provides USB-to-TTL serial function. The Zephyr console output, by default, is utilizing this controller.

Programming and Debugging

Flashing

BOSSA Tool

Flashing the Zephyr kernel onto Arduino Due requires the bossa tool.

There are GUI and command line versions of the bossa tool. The following section provides the steps to build the command line version. Please refer to the bossa tool’s README file on how to build the GUI version.

To build the bossa tool, follow these steps:

1. Checkout the bossa tool’s code from the repository.

   $ git clone https://github.com/shumatech/BOSSA.git
   $ cd BOSSA
   

2. Checkout the arduino branch. The code on the master branch does not work with Arduino Due.

   $ git checkout arduino
   

3. Build the command line version of the bossa tool.

   $ make bin/bossac
   

4. The resulting binary is available at bin/bossac.

Flashing an Application to Arduino Due

Applications for the arduino_due board configuration can be built and flashed in the usual way (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Here is an example for the Hello World application. After building the application, press the Reset button before running the flash command, so the board will boot into the SAM-BA bootloader and be prepared to receive the new program.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b arduino_due samples/hello_world
west flash

After flashing the application, run your favorite terminal program to listen for output. For example, under Linux, the terminal should be /dev/ttyACM0. For example:

$ sudo minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0 -o

The -o option tells minicom not to send the modem initialization string.

Now press the Reset button and you should see “Hello World!” in your terminal.

Note

Make sure your terminal program is closed before flashing the binary image, or it will interfere with the flashing process.

References