GPIO HW PWM @ 143Hz and 20-80% duty cycle, with WiringPi's gpio utility

Question

I've tried to find the solution from other threads but they all seem to miss the point to a certain degree, usually going into kHz and MHz, or into the SW GPIO territory that I don't need.

I have a led controlled opto relay -setup that's not working properly and need to troubleshoot it. I'm trying to use the hardware GPIO on Raspberry Pi 1 B+. Ideally The hardware GPIO would give a PWM of about 143Hz @ 0-3.3V.

This however has proven hard, using the "gpio" utility included with WiringPi. My script:

1. gpio pwm-ms
2. pwmr 70
3. pwmc 2
4. gpio mode 1 pwm
5. gpio pwm 1 500

What I get from that, is continuous (no oscilloscope) voltage output ~1.2V. My Fluke can measure frequencies at least up to several hundred Hz and it reports a flat 0Hz (frequency is probably in kHz, etc.) The 2 leds start functioning at around pwm 700 but there is still no frequency reported by the fluke. So I assume the frequency is way beyond my ~140Hz.

Apparently Rpi.GPIO only works in python? It seems to have a simpler way to set frequency and duty cycle.

1. pwmNN = GPIO.PWM(ioNN, 50)
2. pwmNN.ChangeDutyCycle(80)

I would prefer shell script and gpio utility, but why is it so hard to use?? So how would I get a frequency of 140Hz and a duty cycle of 20-80%? Reading WiringPi documentation and wiki gave me a hint that setting pwm to pwm-ms and range to 70 and divider to 2, would give me something close to 140Hz, but it doesn't seem to do so.

I haven't tried python or C, since it seems that a simple shell script (foo.sh) should do the same thing.

Answer 1

I'm sure wiringPi can do this but you can read its documentation as well as I can. I wouldn't have thought mark space versus balanced would make a difference for 143Hz.

The RPi.GPIO (Python) module is software PWM.

My pigpio library will let you generate hardware timed PWM signals.

To start a 143Hz square wave using the hardware PWM peripheral you can use the following command.

pigs hp 12 143 500000

See HP for details.

This starts a 143Hz signal on gpio 12 with dutycycle 50% (500000/1000000).