14.6: Osservazioni Finali – Final Comments

Assuming a period decrement button was added, all of ports B and D have been used on the Uno leaving us with just six pins (the analog pins A0 through A5). If more ports were available, a good option to add would be a frequency readout. This could be achieved with seven more pins (or eight if using the decimal point) driving the segments of the LED displays plus three or four more pins for the multiplexing (depending on the desired accuracy of the display and frequency range). Some of the other boards in the Arduino family, such as the Mega, would be able to handle this.

The technique used here to change frequency is referred to as “variable sample rate”. It is relatively simple but has certain drawbacks, not the least of which is difficulty in filtering the output (the process of removing the wave form “stair steps” which is something we ignored). An alternate technique uses a constant, high sampling rate. The frequency is altered by generating the desired wave via interpolation in a larger table. The computational load is a little higher but even simple linear interpolation can achieve very high quality results without that much extra processing time. Finally, this sort of application can benefit from the use of timed interrupts. These can be thought of as little snippets of code that run at tightly defined intervals, in this case controlled by on-board timer/counters. The timer/counter would be programmed to trigger a software interrupt at regular intervals thus removing the need for the delayMicroseconds() function. The interrupt service routine would do little more than copy the next value in the wavetable to the output port. This technique would create very stable timing for the waveform and free up the loop() function to just monitor the input switches and such.