Use hardware timer in zephyr

[Domi471]

Hello everyone,

I have a custom board with a NRF52840 microcontroller with 32MHz crystal oscillator, running Zephyr RTOS with NRF Connect SDK and want to make use of a hardware timer to generate interrupts every 50µs.

I have other peripherals in operation (such as Bluetooth, NFC, RTC and USB).

Can you please give me a hint how I can do this (or hand me a link for a sample with prj.conf, devicetree, and source code)? 

Which timer is free to use? (I read, that some timers are already in use for example for bluetooth).

I have only found information for older SDK (NRF5 SDK).

Kind regards,

Dom

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

You can find samples of using nrfx APIs for HW timers in this GitHub repository.

Best regards,
Jørgen

[Domi471]

Thank you very much, this is what I was looking for.

Kind regards,

Dom

[bbooher]

There's an already-accepted approach of using the nrfx APIs directly, but the following should also be valid and I haven't found it recommended in other places in the forum:

Based on the documentation, you can use Zephyr Counter peripherals to access the HW timers rather than the RTC peripheral underlying the Timer API. The API is different, but looks like you can access the timers in a "Zephyr way"  with this approach.

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/hardware/peripherals/counter.html