Weird SPISlave behaviour with STM32f767ZI and Raspberry Pi

Mbed OS Bugs
1

I have been trying to get SPI communication between an STM32f767ZI Nucleo (slave, MBed v6) and a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (master, Raspbian buster) to work, but have been having issues with incorrect bytes being received/sent.

In my test setup, I have SPI1 of the Pi connected to SPI1 of the STM board.
I tested the SPI functionality by running a Python script on the Pi (which does 10 transfers with the bytes 0 to 10) and having the STM echo the received bytes. I used 100KHz and mode 0.

The following is the Pi’s script:

from periphery import SPI

spi = SPI("/dev/spidev0.1", 0, 100000)

for i in range(10):
    data_in = spi.transfer([i])
    print(bin(data_in[0]))

spi.close()

And the code running on the STM:

// SPISlave(PinName mosi, PinName miso, PinName sclk, PinName ssel);
SPISlave slave(PB_5, PB_4, PB_3, PA_4);

int main() {
  slave.frequency(100000);
  slave.format(8, 0);

  SEGGER_RTT_printf(0, "Init\n");

  // Prime initial reply
  slave.reply(0x01);

  for (;;) {
    if (slave.receive()) {
      int v = slave.read();
      SEGGER_RTT_printf(0, "received %d\n", v);
      
      // Send message on next receive
      slave.reply(v);
    }
  }
}

The two issues I had were:

  1. It seems like bytes are sometimes not received on the STM side

Here is an example of the output from the STM (using SEGGER RTT)

Init
received 0
received 1
received 2
received 3
received 4
received 6 # missing 5?
received 7
received 8
received 9

Here the 5 is missing, I had different cases where other bytes were missing.

  1. The bytes received on the Pi were sometimes incorrect, e.g. a bit flip.

This is an example from the Pi’s output:

0b1 # master sent 0, slave replies initial 0x01
0b0 # master sent 1, slave replies previous input, which is 0
0b1
0b10
0b10 # expected 0b11, bit flip?
0b100
0b1 # expected 0b101?
0b110
0b111
0b1000

I have tried different frequencies (the Pi has a core clock speed of 250 MHz, with a 16-bit prescaler, I believe SPI1 of the f767 has a clock of max 108MHz) and different SPI modes for both of the devices. I have also tried using SPI4 of the STM, but I get the same issues with those setups.

Am I doing something incorrectly or is there a fundamental problem I am missing?

2

Hello Nick,

I have the same experience (missing and flipped bytes) when using STM32F411RE :frowning:
However, the same SPISlave code works fine on LPC1768 :slight_smile:

Best regards, Zoltan

3

Hi
Maybe the SEGGER_RTT_printf inside the receive loop takes too much time…?

4

Yup I discovered this as well. Storing the received values and printing those after showed that the correct values sent from the Pi. Thanks!