When reading uncompressed bitmap data directly, readinto can work
much more quickly than a Python-coded loop.
On a Raspberry Pi Pico, I benchmarked a modified version of
adafruit_bitmap_font's pcf reader which uses readinto instead of
the existing code. My test font was a 72-point file created from Arial.
This decreased the time to load all the ASCII glyphs from 4.9 seconds to
just 0.44 seconds.
While this attempts to support many pixel configurations (1/2/4/8/16/24/32
bpp; swapped words and pixels) only the single combination used by
PCF fonts was tested.
This is a first go at it, done by naive replacing of all array
operations with corresponding operations on the list. Note that
there is a lot of unnecessary type conversions, here. Also, list_pop
has been copied, because it's decalerd STATIC in py/objlist.h
Since we want to expose the list of group's children to the user,
we should only have the original objects in it, without any other
additional data, and compute the native object as needed.
* Comment on the reason for scaling by 256
* Divide by 256 instead of shifting
* fix a cast; eliminate an unneeded roundf() to get a few bytes code back
On the Pico, this increases the "fill rate" of
pixels[:] = newvalues
considerably. On a strip of 240 RGB LEDs, auto_write=False, the timings
are:
|| Brightness || Before || After || Improvement ||
|| 1.0 || 117 kpix/s || 307 kpix/s || 2.62x ||
|| 0.07 || 117 kpix/s || 273 kpix/s || 2.33x ||
It's worth noting that even the "before" rate is fast compared to the
time to transmit a single neopixel, but any time we can gain back
in the whole pipeline will let marginal animations work a little better.
To set all the pixels in this way and then show() gives a pleasant bump
to the framerate, from about 108Hz to 124Hz (1.15x)
The main source of speed-up is using integer math instead of floating
point math for the calculation of the post-scaled pixel values. A slight
secondary gain is achieved by avoiding the scaling altogether when
the scale factor is 1.0.
Because the math is not exactly the same, some scaled pixel values may
change by +- 1 RGBW "step". In practice, this is unlikely to matter.
The gains are bigger on the Pico and other M0 microcontrollers than M4
microcontrollers with floating point math in the hardware.
Happily, flash size is also improved a bit on the Pico build I did,
going from
> 542552 bytes used, 506024 bytes free in flash firmware space out of 1048576 bytes (1024.0kB).
to
> 542376 bytes used, 506200 bytes free in flash firmware space out of 1048576 bytes (1024.0kB).
Also found a race condition between timer_disable and redraw, which
would happen if I debugger-paused inside common_hal_rgbmatrix_timer_disable
or put a delay or print inside it. That's what pausing inside reconstruct
fixes.
So that the "right timer" can be chosen, `timer_allocate` now gets the `self`
pointer. It's guaranteed at this point that the pin information is accurate,
so you can e.g., find a PWM unit related to the pins themselves.
This required touching each port to add the parameter even though it's
unused everywhere but raspberrypi.
* Introduce explicit serpentine: bool argument instead of using negative
numbers (thanks, ghost of @tannewt sitting on one shoulder)
* Fix several calculations of height
Testing performed (matrixportal):
* set up a serpentine 64x64 virtual display with 2 64x32 tiles
* tried all 4 rotations
* looked at output of REPL
Changed calls: PointSize(), LineWidth(), VertexTranslateX() and VertexTranslateY()
Units for all the above are now pixels, not fixed-point integers. This matches OpenGL.
Docstrings updated accordingly
The RP2040 is new microcontroller from Raspberry Pi that features
two Cortex M0s and eight PIO state machines that are good for
crunching lots of data. It has 264k RAM and a built in UF2
bootloader too.
Datasheet: https://pico.raspberrypi.org/files/rp2040_datasheet.pdf
Microsoft documentation says:
> If biCompression equals BI_RGB and the bitmap uses 8 bpp or less, the bitmap has a color table immediatelly following the BITMAPINFOHEADER structure. The color table consists of an array of RGBQUAD values. The size of the array is given by the biClrUsed member. If biClrUsed is zero, the array contains the maximum number of colors for the given bitdepth; that is, 2^biBitCount colors.
Formerly, we treated 0 colors as "no image palette" during construction,
but then during common_hal_displayio_ondiskbitmap_get_pixel indexed into
the palette anyway. This could have unpredictable results. On a pygamer,
it gave an image that was blue and black. On magtag, it gave a crash.
The transparent_color field was never initialized. I _think_ this means
its value was always set to 0, or the blackest of blacks. Instead,
initialize it to the sentinel value, newly given the name
NO_TRANSPARENT_COLOR.
This exposed a second problem: The test for whether there was an existing
transparent color was wrong (backwards). I am guessing that this was not
found due to the first bug; since the converter had a transparent color,
the correct test would have led to always getting the error "Only one
color can be transparent at a time".
Closes#3723
Hybrid allocation is now part of the infrastructure. Moving memory contents would not be necessary because displayio can recreate them, but does not hurt.
Hybrid allocation is now part of the infrastructure. Moving memory contents would not be necessary because displayio can recreate them, but does not hurt.
This allows calls to `allocate_memory()` while the VM is running, it will then allocate from the GC heap (unless there is a suitable hole among the supervisor allocations), and when the VM exits and the GC heap is freed, the allocation will be moved to the bottom of the former GC heap and transformed into a proper supervisor allocation. Existing movable allocations will also be moved to defragment the supervisor heap and ensure that the next VM run gets as much memory as possible for the GC heap.
By itself this breaks terminalio because it violates the assumption that supervisor_display_move_memory() still has access to an undisturbed heap to copy the tilegrid from. It will work in many cases, but if you're unlucky you will get garbled terminal contents after exiting from the vm run that created the display. This will be fixed in the following commit, which is separate to simplify review.
* Initialize the EPaper display on the MagTag at start.
* Tweak the display send to take a const buffer.
* Correct Luma math
* Multiply the blue component, not add.
* Add all of the components together before dividing. This
reduces the impact of truncated division.
After calling board.SPI().deinit(), calling board.SPI() again would return the unusable deinited object and there was no way of getting it back into an initialized state until the end of the session.
Fixes#3581.
Pins were marked as never_reset by common_hal_displayio_fourwire_construct() and common_hal_sharpdisplay_framebuffer_construct(), but these marks were never removed, so at the end of a session after displayio.release_displays(), {spi|i2c}_singleton would be set to NULL but the pins would not be reset. In the next session, board.SPI() and board.I2C() were unable to reconstruct the object because the pins were still in use.
For symmetry with creation of the singleton, add deinitialization before setting it to NULL in reset_board_busses(). This makes the pins resettable, so that reset_port(), moved behind it, then resets them.
At the end of a session that called displayio.release_displays() (and did not initialize a new display), a board.I2C() bus that was previously used by a display would wrongly be considered still in use. While I can’t think of any unrecoverable problem this would cause in the next session, it violates the assumption that a soft reboot resets everything not needed by displays, potentially leading to confusion.
By itself, this change does not fix the problem yet - rather, it introduces the same issue as in #3581 for SPI. This needs to be solved in the same way for I2C and SPI.
This is enabled by #3482
I was unable to determine why previously I had added sizeof(void*)
to the GC heap allocation, so I removed that code as a mistake.
@cwalther determined that for boards with 2 displays (monster m4sk),
start_terminal would be called for each one, leaking supervisor heap
entries.
Determine, by comparing addresses, whether the display being acted on
is the first display (number zero) and do (or do not) call start_terminal.
stop_terminal can safely be called multiple times, so there's no need
to guard against calling it more than once.
Slight behavioral change: The terminal size would follow the displays[0]
size, not the displays[1] size
If the display is paused, `_PM_swapbuffer_maybe` will never return.
So, when brightness is 0, refresh does nothing. This makes it necessary
to update the display when unpausing.
Closes: #3524
A call to supervisor_start_terminal remained in
common_hal_displayio_display_construct and was copied to other display
_construct functions, even though it was also being done in
displayio_display_core_construct when that was factored out.
Originally, this was harmless, except it created an extra allocation.
When investigating #3482, I found that this bug became harmful,
especially for displays that were created in Python code, because it
caused a supervisor allocation to leak.
I believe that it is safe to merge #3482 after this PR is merged.
An RGBMatrix has no bus and no bus_free method. It is always possible
to refresh the display.
This was not a problem before, but the fix I suggested (#3449) added
a call to core_bus_free when a FramebufferDisplay was being refreshed.
This was not caught during testing.
This is a band-aid fix and it brings to light a second problem in which
a SharpDisplay + FrameBuffer will not have a 'bus' object, and yet does
operate using a shared SPI bus. This kind of display will need a
"bus-free" like function to be added, or it can have problems like
#3309.
It was incorrect to NULL out the pointer to our heap allocated buffer in
`reset`, because subsequent to framebuffer_reset, but while
the heap was still active, we could call `get_bufinfo` again,
leading to a fresh allocation on the heap that is about to be destroyed.
Typical stack trace:
```
#1 0x0006c368 in sharpdisplay_framebuffer_get_bufinfo
#2 0x0006ad6e in _refresh_display
#3 0x0006b168 in framebufferio_framebufferdisplay_background
#4 0x00069d22 in displayio_background
#5 0x00045496 in supervisor_background_tasks
#6 0x000446e8 in background_callback_run_all
#7 0x00045546 in supervisor_run_background_tasks_if_tick
#8 0x0005b042 in common_hal_neopixel_write
#9 0x00044c4c in clear_temp_status
#10 0x000497de in spi_flash_flush_keep_cache
#11 0x00049a66 in supervisor_external_flash_flush
#12 0x00044b22 in supervisor_flash_flush
#13 0x0004490e in filesystem_flush
#14 0x00043e18 in cleanup_after_vm
#15 0x0004414c in run_repl
#16 0x000441ce in main
```
When this happened -- which was inconsistent -- the display would keep
some heap allocation across reset which is exactly what we need to avoid.
NULLing the pointer in reconstruct follows what RGBMatrix does, and that
code is a bit more battle-tested anyway.
If I had a motivation for structuring the SharpMemory code differently,
I can no longer recall it.
Testing performed: Ran my complicated calculator program over multiple
iterations without observing signs of heap corruption.
Closes: #3473
This already begins obscuring things, because now there are two sets of
shared-module functions for manipulating the same structure, e.g.,
common_hal_canio_remote_transmission_request_get_id and
common_hal_canio_message_get_id
Tested & working:
* Send standard packets
* Receive standard packets (1 FIFO, no filter)
Interoperation between SAM E54 Xplained running this tree and
MicroPython running on STM32F405 Feather with an external
transceiver was also tested.
Many other aspects of a full implementation are not yet present,
such as error detection and recovery.
The expectations of displayio.Display and frambufferio.FramebufferDisplay
are different when it comes to rotation.
In displayio.Display, if you call core_construct with a WxH = 64x32
and rotation=90, you get something that is 32 pixels wide and 64 pixels
tall in the LCD's coordinate system.
This is fine, as the existing definitions were written to work like this.
With framebuffer displays, however, the underlying framebuffer (such as
RGBMatrix) says "I am WxH pixels wide in my coordinate system" and the
constructor is given a rotation; when the rotation indicates a transpose
that means "exchange rows and columns, so that to the Groups displayed
on it, there is an effectively HxW pixel region for use".
Happily, we already have a set_rotation method. Thus (modulo the time
spent debugging things anyway:) the fix is simple: Always request no
rotation from core_construct, then immediately fix up the rotation
to match what was requested.
Testing performed: 32x16 RGBMatrix on Metro M4 Express (but using
the Airlift firmware, as this is the configuration the error was reported
on):
* initially construct display at 0, 90, 180, 270 degrees
* later change angle to 0, 90, 180, 270 degrees
* no garbled display
* no safe mode crashes
e.g., allocating a 192x32x6bpp matrix would be enough to trigger this
reliably on a Metro M4 Express using the "memory hogging" layout.
Allocating 64x32x6bpp could trigger it, but somewhat unreliably.
There are several things going on here:
* we make the failing call with interrupts off
* we were throwing an exception with interrupts off
* protomatter failed badly in _PM_free when it was partially-initialized
Incorporate the fix from protomatter, switch to a non-throwing malloc
variant, and ensure that interrupts get turned back on.
This decreases the quality of the MemoryError (it cannot report the size
of the failed allocation) but allows CircuitPython to survive, rather
than faulting.
