PWM (Onboard RGB LED)

Controlling PWM on NavQ

The PWM chips are tied to the onboard LED on NavQ. There are three PWM chips: pwmchip0, pwmchip1, and pwmchip2. Each of these "chips" have one PWM line attached to them: pwm0. To use these PWM lines, you will need to use the sysfs interface.

Using the sysfs interface to control the onboard LED

Currently, you must be root to access these PWM chips. In the future we will use a udev rules file to change the permissions. This will allow the navq user to write to the psuedofiles for these chips.

Step 1

Log into the root user on NavQ by running this command:

$ sudo su -
<enter password>

Step 2

Navigate to /sys/class/pwm and run the following commands:

$ echo 0 > pwmchip0/export
$ echo 0 > pwmchip1/export
$ echo 0 > pwmchip2/export

Step 3

Now that our PWM lines are exported for each chip, we can change the duty cycle of the PWM lines and enable them. The default frequency is 2730667 Hz. For a 50% duty cycle, we will use half of this number: 1365333. Apply this duty cycle to each chip by running the following commands:

$ echo 1365333 > pwmchip0/pwm0/duty_cycle
$ echo 1365333 > pwmchip1/pwm0/duty_cycle
$ echo 1365333 > pwmchip2/pwm0/duty_cycle

Step 4

We will now enable each line. The colors for each chip are as follows:

pwmchip0: RED

pwmchip1: GREEN

pwmchip2: BLUE

To enable the colors, run the following commands:

$ echo 1 > pwmchip0/pwm0/enable
$ echo 1 > pwmchip1/pwm0/enable
$ echo 1 > pwmchip2/pwm0/enable

Running these commands in succession should enable the LEDs in a RED, GREEN, BLUE pattern until you reach a white LED.

Controlling the onboard LEDs programmatically

Comnig soon