DMA ⁽¹⁾

This Youtube video by Controllers Tech shows how to use an STM32 to measure the frequency of an incoming rectangular wave using the input capture functionality of the timers. The code shown the video works but there are a few areas which could be improved, as I will now discuss. Then I make a performance improvement by using DMA instead of interrupts. The code is written using STM's HAL library which means that it does not have to handle the specific STM32's registers, which makes it more portable. However, HAL is still specific to the ARM and STM architecture, so you need to know what features are available in your internal peripherals to be able to write HAL function calls with the appropriate parameters. Initialising Global variables Controllers Tech declares a set of global variables at the top of main.c and initialises them to zero. Since we can rely on the C runtime to clear the RAM, this is unnecessary for globals and can use up code space and boot time. I would remove the initialisations unless it is thought likely that these lines would be moved into a function, making them local automatic variables, in which case they would need to be initialised.