TS-4100 Microcontroller

The TS-4100 includes an on-board supervisory microcontroller. It is an 8051 based device that has a number of operational responsibilities. It creates a USB serial UART for the debug UART, manages power-up and reset sequencing which includes deep sleep mode, manages charging the TS-SILO SuperCaps, is the system WDT, and has a number of ADC inputs of various system voltages.

Information about the microcontroller as well as output from its internal ADCs can be retrieved with the command:

tsmicroctl -i

Since the microcontroller handles power-up and reset, it includes a low power "sleep" mode that removes power from the CPU and all peripherals for a predefined period of time. Note that as soon as the sleep command is issued, the microcontroller will more power from all peripherals. Care must be taken to ensure there is no damage to peripherals or datalosses occurring during this sudden power-off event. It is recommended to run this command as the last step after a proper Linux shutdown sequence.

Sleep mode can be entered with the command:

tsmicroctl --sleep <time in seconds>

After the internal timer expires, the microcontroller will run the power-up sequence and boot the whole system back up normally.

On platforms that support TS-SILO supercapacitor backup, 'tsmicroctl' can be used to control that charging from userspace. The microcontroller itself has been carefully tuned to charge the supercapacitors at a safe rate, these parameters are not adjustable. However charging can be enabled and disabled from the command line:

# Enable charging
tsmicroctl --tssiloon

# Disable charging
tsmicroctl --tssilooff