All-in-one_setPWM - complementary with dead-time?

[s163555]

Hi everyone! I am working on a student project where I need to generate a complementary pulsed PWM signal with dead-time control with a 10 kHz repetition frequency. A snippet from a related scientific paper is seen below. The 5 period 5 MHz 50% duty PWM pulse repeats with 10 kHz.

I succesfully generated a 5 MHz PWM signal on my NUCLEO-F411RE board

Now I need to make the complementary signal and ensure the appropriate dead-time is present. I am a total beginner and I am not sure how to proceed with this. I know the datasheet mentions TIMER1 has this function

Is there a way to use the existing API to do this? Or is this not the right approach?

[ABOSTM]

Hi @s163555,
You are right, TIMER1 of STM32F411 support Complementary signals with dead time insertion.
But the HardwareTimer implementation of stm32duino core doesn't support Complementary signals with dead time insertion.

Nevertheless there are ways to make it work:

• either you get ride of stm32duino core and use STM32Cube firmware.
  see TIM_ComplementarySignals example: https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/STM32CubeF4/tree/master/Projects/STM32446E_EVAL/Examples/TIM/TIM_ComplementarySignals
  You can use CubeMX tools to help in the adaptation of this example for Nucleo-F411

• or you continue to use stm32duino core, but specifically for PWM generation, instead of using HardwareTimer API, you use STM32Cube HAL API (which are directly usable in Arduino sketch).
  see TIM_ComplementarySignals example: https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/STM32CubeF4/tree/master/Projects/STM32446E_EVAL/Examples/TIM/TIM_ComplementarySignals

[s163555]

Hi @ABOSTM and thank you for your great suggestion
I am not very familiar with STM32Cube HAL API and I have been trying out various means to avoid it since I tried but never got anything to work. I think it has a steep learning curve and I get easily lost in the IDE project features. However, I decided to give it another go and I generated the TIM_ComplementarySignals for the F446E and changed the target to F411RE, imported in the STM32CubeIDE and then tried to build, but I have build errors already:
arm-none-eabi-gcc "../Core/Src/main.c" -mcpu=cortex-m4 -std=gnu11 -g3 -DDEBUG -DUSE_HAL_DRIVER -DSTM32F411xE -c -I../Core/Inc -I../Drivers/STM32F4xx_HAL_Driver/Inc -I../Drivers/STM32F4xx_HAL_Driver/Inc/Legacy -I../Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32F4xx/Include -I../Drivers/CMSIS/Include -O0 -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wall -fstack-usage -MMD -MP -MF"Core/Src/main.d" -MT"Core/Src/main.o" --specs=nano.specs -mfpu=fpv4-sp-d16 -mfloat-abi=hard -mthumb -o "Core/Src/main.o" ../Core/Src/main.c: In function 'SystemClock_Config': ../Core/Src/main.c:127:32: error: 'RCC_PLLM_DIV4' undeclared (first use in this function); did you mean 'RCC_PLLP_DIV4'? 127 | RCC_OscInitStruct.PLL.PLLM = RCC_PLLM_DIV4; | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~ | RCC_PLLP_DIV4 ../Core/Src/main.c:127:32: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in make: *** [Core/Src/subdir.mk:34: Core/Src/main.o] Error 1
It is evident that this is a matter of an undeclared variable, but I have been looking around in all the source and include files in my project and can find no mention of RCC_PLLM_DIV4 or RCC_PLLP_DIV4 for that matter, even though RCC_PLLP_DIV4 exists according to the builder. Do you have any idea why it already complains about generated code?

I feel a bit in over my head with the HAL (I focus mostly on hardware), but hopefully I can just get this PWM driver up and running and integrate it with something more intuitive like stm32duino, etc.

[fpistm]

RCC_PLLM_DIV4 does not exist for F4, that's why you got this error. If you generate it with cubeMX, it should be correct. I've tested and it uses 4 instead of this define.
Don't know how you get this value, anyway here we support only Arduino not STM32CubeIDE. You should go to ST community: https://community.st.com/s/

[s163555]

@fpistm I understand. I am not sure why that error occured. I re-generated the code and got it working eventually as I wanted. I was wondering if there is an example of mixed-use of stm32duino framework and STM32 HAL that I can take a look at?

[fpistm]

Here an example of a cube project converted to Arduino
https://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.php?t=110

And refers to the wiki to disable timer API from Arduino