Can NCP and RCP support additional GPIO functionality in their firmware

[Bhumika]

I am using nRF52840 SoC for NCP/RCP application at the border router side, and nRF_Connect_SDK_v1.9.1 for NCP/RCP application development.
My border router is my custom gateway which has a Rpi Compute module in it.
In my NCP/RCP firmware, can I add additional application to use the nRF52840 hardware as I2C slave and also some GPIOs to use for digital/analog read/write functionality in parallel to running NCP/RCP application.
Will that implementation cause any issue in NCP/RCP smooth functionality?

 

[Sigurd Hellesvik]

Hi

I will do some research to see if this can cause issues, and/or if there are any things you should do to be avoid issues.
You will hear back from me by end of Thursday.

Regards,
Sigurd Hellesvik

[Bhumika]

Thank You.

Awaiting your reply.

[Sigurd Hellesvik]

Hi

Many peripherals, such as our TWIM Driver use easyDMA, and therefore most of the peripheral operation is done outside the CPU.
For these, only writing/reading to/from the peripheral and working with the data will require CPU interaction.

GPIO work still require the CPU, but if this is not hugging too many resources.

I recommend to have a look at Thread Priorities to make sure that the coprocessor runs at higher priorities than your other tasks.

If you face issues, you could also look at the priorities of interrupts in Zephyr. I guess these should be configured in a good way by default, but you could look at Devicetree and Interrupts to learn more.

Does this answer your questions?

Regards,
Sigurd Hellesvik