Add information about RPi drive strength

hslick-master
Nicholas Chin 2023-04-07 18:12:14 -06:00
parent ad646ac89c
commit 1eaee8ae3a
1 changed files with 58 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -246,6 +246,64 @@ Under the Interface section, you can enable SPI.
The device for communicating via SPI as at `/dev/spidev0.0`
RPi Drive Strength
------------------
Flashrom on the RPi may not be able to detect the SPI flash chip on some
systems, even if your wiring and clip are set up perfectly. This may be due to
the drive strength of the Raspberry Pi GPIOs, which is 8mA by default. Drive
strength is essentially the maximum current the pin can output while also
maintaining the minimum high-level voltage. In the case of the Pi, this voltage
is 3.0V.
Similarly, the SPI flash chip has a minimum voltage it will accept as a high
logic value. This is commonly 0.7\*VCC for SPI flash, which is 2.31V for 3.3V
chips. If the drive strength is too low, the voltage at the pins of the flash
chip may fall below this minimum voltage, causing it to register as a low logic
value instead of the high value that was sent.
On many systems, the VCC pin of the SPI flash is shared with other chips on the
system, causing them to be powered through the voltage supplied through your
programming clip. In this case, parts of the chipset may power up, and it may
attempt to set the SPI lines high or low, interfering with the data the Pi is
trying to send. If the Pi and chipset are trying to set a pin to different
values, the side with a greater drive strength will be able to "pull" the
voltage toward the level it wants to set.
Fortunately, the drive strength of the Raspberry Pi can be increased up to
16mA. There are a few tools that can set this, such as the pigs utility from
the pigpio project. On the Raspberry Pi OS, the following commands should
install pigpio and set the drive strength to 16mA:
Install pigpio:
sudo apt install pigpio
Start the pigpiod daemon, which the pigs utility communicates with to interact
with the gpios:
sudo pigpiod
Set the drive strength of GPIO group 0, which contains the spi0 pins, to 16mA:
pigs pads 0 16
Note that the drive strength hardware works in multiples of 2mA, and pigs will
round odd values up to the next multiple of 2. You can check the current drive
strength using
pigs padg 0
WARNING: If the chipset is very strongly trying to drive a pin to a value
opposite that of the Pi, more than 16mA pass through the Pi's GPIO pins, which
may damage them as they are only designed for 16mA. The drive strength is NOT a
current limit. That said, this is a risk to the Pi regardless of the drive
strength. Resistors between the chipset and the flash should protect against
this, though not all boards have these.
See
<https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#gpio-pads-control>
for more information about the drive strength control on the Pi.
Caution about RPi
-----------------