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I'm trying to generate a modulated UART signal from the standard Tx coming out of my microcontroller. What I'm trying to accomplish is to have a 100us wide pulse generated on every edge (rising/falling) of my UART signal.

My plan was to send the UART out over the Tx pin of the STM32 I'm using, and loop it back into a GPIO. Then I could trigger an interrupt on the rising/falling edges of the GPIO and generate a pulse on an output pin for each interrupt.

My questions are:

Does this make sense?

Is there a better way to do this?

What's the best way to generate the clock (2* Baud Rate) for the modulation?

**Looking for software solutions only if possible.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Do you actually want to transmit the UART stream, or are you just using it as a convenient mechanism for positioning the pulses in the time domain? If the latter, I will add an answer that may be of some use. \$\endgroup\$
    – markt
    Feb 27, 2014 at 23:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm transmitting it to another device, but it looks like the solution I proposed above is working. I'm resetting my timer every time my loopback gpio triggers and then toggling my final output based on the timer. \$\endgroup\$
    – spizzak
    Feb 28, 2014 at 16:33

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You could use an Exclusive OR like the 74AHC86 - it's a Schmitt trigger type and if you feed the uart input to both inputs but have an RC delay on one of the inputs (say 10us), you'll get a 10us pulse each time the uart output changes state.

I think 100us (as per your question is too long for most common bitrates - 9600bps has a bit period of 104us so any faster will be a problem - that's why I suggested 10us (R is 10k ohm and C is about 1nF).

This is a fairly standard method of clock recovery on synchronous systems by the way.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm not using a standard baud rate, and the pulse may actually be wider than 100us even. Also, I'm trying to find a software solution if possible so as to not modify the board I'm working with. \$\endgroup\$
    – spizzak
    Feb 26, 2014 at 17:50

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