w5500 Lan v12 Base and SD Card

basgoossen

Hi all,
I have a project where i want to use the Core Basic together with the w5500 Lan Base in an industrial setting. Since the Core Basic is fitted into a steel cabinet and there is lots of interference i don't want to rely on WiFi. I'm using the espressif arduino framework to proram the base. Now i can get SD to work, and i can get the w5500 to work but not together. As soon as initiate the w5500 module and connect to LAN my SD card stops to function. Not really surprising probably since they are both using the same SPI bus (also together with the TFT display).

I'm using the esp32_w5500 lwip driver from espressif, wich plays nice with the spi_master (spi_bus_add_device). However the entire SD and TFT SPI interface of M5Stack is completely ignoring this and is just hard setting CS without checking.

The most elegant solution whould be to find a SDFS implementation that works nicely together with spi_master i guess. But i wonder what is your take on this. Has anybody else ever tried the w5500 module together with SD. It does seem like a common thing to do, but i cannot find any actual cases of this, nor real solutions.

So i'd like to share some thoughts. I'm willing to spend some efford into changing up the SD and TFT drivers from M5Stack, but i want to know if there are already available solutions first.

Best regards,
Bas

felmue

Hello @basgoossen

It is my understanding that multiple SPI slaves can be controlled by one SPI master as long as all code is running in a single task.

That said, I think the issue is that two SPI masters are defined using the same GPIOs for SCK, MOSI and MISO. One SPI master is defined via M5Stack library (for TFT and SD card) and another is defined via spi_master (for LAN).

Have you considered using an Arduino library for Ethernet as well, e.g. this one.

I found an Arduino web server example which uses Ethernet and serves the index.htm file from the SD card. Please have a look here.

Thanks
Felix

basgoossen

Hi Felix

Thanks for your reply. 2 SPI masters you say, thats an interesting take and could well be an issue i have overlooked. My take was purely looking for race conditions between the chip select and spi usage. (Since the w5500 lwip is probably controlled in core 0 and the SD and TFT are controlled in core 1).

I've looked into using Ethernet last night, and this works however the http has to be done in local code as there does not seem to be a more intelligent webserver out there using Ethernet. Also the examples are all synchronous and blocking. I started coding a webserver based on Ethernet, but after one hour found myself wondering if that was really necessary (like parsing requests and so on in local code). So the support for Ethernet seems way more limited ( low level ) over LWiP. Even though it is a possible rout to threat so it is still a consideration.

Thanks,
Bas

basgoossen

Yes, it worked ;-). I locked myself up in the office for the last 48 hours. And rewrote AsyncWebserver but using Ethernet.h instead of LWiP. All features of AsyncWebserver are available, the only thing you need to take care of is the periodic upkeep (a single line of code in the main loop).
I also added an updater for the internal ESP clock (separate) to update over NTP via Ethernet.h.

All in all it took the most out of the past 48 hours but for me it was very worthwhile. Consumed progmem is less than half of what is was (total program went down from 1.1MB to 604kB). Static ram usage went down from (critical 90%) to a comfortable 35%. Dynamic Ram usage decreased by a 40%. All of this is probably mostly due to the fact that we can rely on the W5500's internal IP stack instead of LWiP.

Another gain for me is that the periodic upkeep is very predictible, making my main control loop (which also runs RS485) more stable and very predictible. Loop time is now (very) stable at under a ms. Wheres with LWiP it would vary a lot under network load. As an embedded system engineer (by background) this is one of the things that pleases me the most. I can serve a 60MB file or even upload a large file (limited only by storage) to the system without noticable impact on the main process.

Performance wise it seems to be a tad slower for now than LWiP over WiFi with AsyncWebserver. Serving the webui of around 3MB takes about a second longer at roughly 4 seconds to fully load. But there is plenty room for optimization as i now only use a single socket buffer of 2048kB in the w5500 at a time. So there is about 8 times as much performance available.

I'll most likely make a Github page for this if there is any interest from the community. For now i'm going to have a good sleep 😉👍

mvpete

@basgoossen I believe I’m having the same issue you’re having! I’ve been searching for hours! How did you end up dealing with it? My HTTP server is using the built in esp http server. So I need the 5500 module attached to the tcp.