3 ms·
Are the pico's PWM channels true hardware PWM (truly on/off) or software-emulated PWM (flickering on "fast enough" to create an envelope) Some cheap, learning
by grendelt 5y ago
Are the pico's PWM channels true hardware PWM (truly on/off) or software-emulated PWM (flickering on "fast enough" to create an envelope)
Some cheap, learning platforms like the micro:bit do emulated PWM which yields jittery servo demos. Sure you could put a circuit to smooth the on/off cycle, but as an instructional tool, I like the external hardware to be as minimal as possible.
- mmoskal 5y agoThe NRF51 on micro:bit doesn't have a PWM, so indeed it's emulated. The NRF52 on micro:bit v2 has PWM, so you should see no jitter. RP2040 can also generate PWM signals in multiple ways. BTW, the problem with servo is not about "flickering not fast enough" but about length of the pulse. Servos require ~0.5-1.5ms pulse every 20ms, where the length of the short pulse maps ~linearly to angles of the servo. If you miss the timing by say 50us you get jitter.
- IshKebab 5y agoAre you sure about the nRF51? It doesn't have dedicated PWM but as I recall you can connect the timer peripheral to the GPIOs so it's still all done in hardware. Maybe that was not worth the software effort though.
- antattack 5y agoRP2040 has 16 hardware-based PWM channels with freq from 7.5Hz to 62.5MHz.