BeagleBoardPWM

There are three pins capable of PWM (pulse-width modulation) exposed on the C3/C4 BeagleBoard expansion header. PWM is useful for control of a number of devices, from LEDs (which can be faded smoothly with PWM) to DC motors. For robotics, this means that three hobby servos can easily be controlled by the Beagle given nothing more than a simple level-shifting circuit.

OMAP Mux Configuration
Because the PWM pins are not set as such by default, the OMAP's mux must be configured to expose them before they can be used. See BeagleBoardPinMux for more details on this procedure. The short version is to add the following lines to the definition of  in arch/arm/mach-omap2/board-omap3beagle.c (this has been tested with the 2.6.32 OMAP branch of the kernel).

OMAP3_MUX(DSS_DATA15, OMAP_MUX_MODE2|OMAP_PIN_OUTPUT), /* GPT9_PWMEVT, ball AB26, ex pin 4 */ OMAP3_MUX(UART2_TX, OMAP_MUX_MODE2|OMAP_PIN_OUTPUT), /* GPT11_PWMEVT, ball AA25, ex pin 6 */ OMAP3_MUX(UART2_RTS, OMAP_MUX_MODE2|OMAP_PIN_OUTPUT), /* GTP10_PWMEVT, ball AB25, ex pin 10 */

Obviously these lines should precede the line terminating the array.

Activating PWM via Timer Registers
PWM output on the BeagleBoard is done via the OMAP processor's general-purpose timer mechanism, described in the OMAP35x TRM in section 16.2.4 (page 2546). To briefly summarize this (and simplify significantly), the general-purpose timer is a continuously-incrementing counter that can be configured to toggle the PWM output high when a certain value is reached, and low when it overflows. By adjusting the first number the duty cycle can be set. Setting the value the counter starts at can be used to set the frequency of the PWM.





Each GP timer has a 4K block for memory-mapped registers (see TRM Table 16-12). The start addresses of these blocks for the timers on the BeagleBoard are listed below.

These are the registers relevant to our purpose:

OMAP3530 PWM library
There is a small library available to simplify manipulating the timer registers via. It is made available under the LGPL 2.1.

Download: omap3530-pwm-1.0.tar.gz

Links and References

 * RE: PWM Driver for Overo?, Scott Ellis
 * OMAP 3530 Technical Reference Manaul
 * BeagleBoard System Reference Manaul
 * [[Media:I2C_PWM_Hardware.pdf|Presentation on I2C, PWM and Hardware interfacing with the BeagleBoard]]
 * Project: Sumo Robot -- uses PWM to control drive motors via L298 motor drivers.
 * [[Media:I2C_PWM_Hardware.pdf|Presentation on I2C, PWM and Hardware interfacing with the BeagleBoard]]
 * Project: Sumo Robot -- uses PWM to control drive motors via L298 motor drivers.