Faster SHIFTOUT without dedicated hardware, possible?

[CuriousOne]

Hello, I'm driving APA102 LEDs with shiftout, and while for on-off speed is ok, when I want to do some cool and fast color change, speed is not enough.
So as I understand, SHIFTOUT is just making data pin high-low with required bits, synced with clock pulses, right?
So maybe there's a code which can do this at faster rate, than shiftout does? without using MSSP, 18F series and so on.

[tumbleweed]

Sure.

Here's some code that would shift out a byte without using asm or anything special... should be much faster than SHIFTOUT since it's format is dedicated and loop is unrolled. Just set WREG to the value to shift out and call SHOUT.

SHCLK var PORTB.0
SHDAT var PORTB.1

; init pins to output low
low SHCLK
low SHDAT

; send $55
WREG = $55
call SHOUT

; send $AA
WREG = $AA
call SHOUT


; SHOUT
; shift out 8 bits of data, LSB to MSB
; data clocked on rising edge of SHCLK
; WREG = data to send
SHOUT:
SHDAT = 0
if WREG.0 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.1 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.2 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.3 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.4 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.5 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.6 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.7 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
SHCLK = 1
SHCLK = 0

return

That would be the equivalent of
SHIFTOUT SHDAT, SHCLK, LSBFIRST, [bval/8]

[tumbleweed]

You may find that routine is actually too fast for the hardware you're controlling.
If so, you can add NOPs to slow it down a bit...

SHDAT = 0
if WREG.0 then
  SHDAT = 1
endif
asm NOP endasm
SHCLK = 1
asm NOP endasm
SHCLK = 0
asm NOP endasm

[CuriousOne]

Thanks, that's great!
So if we can replace SHIFTOUT with faster code easily, maybe there is a such way for I2CREAD too? without using MSSP module?

[tumbleweed]

I2C operations are slower to begin with, but you could speed things up over the stock routines.

Having the pins be set in software is what usually slows things down. I've implemented these before and ended up with something around 240KHz with programmable pins.
Dedicated pins speeds it up a lot... think I got around 400KHz doing it that way (running at 64MHz).

You have to watch out with the speed and open-drain IO operation to size the pullups as required.
For faster speeds I like to use active pullups which can really speed up the low-to-high transitions vs using a resistor.
This works out well when using the MSSP since you can get much faster speeds there.

[CuriousOne]

Well, I tried to use MSSP, but no luck, so this is why I'm asking.
Current I2CREAD is too slow, it runs at about 50khz (and is NOT oscillator dependent, as someone stated, I checked with scope, it is around 50khz at 4mhz, 8mhz or 16mhz oscillator speed).
200Khz would be fine for me. I'm using 24C64 as an external font data storage, and at current speed (50khz), reading 1kb of data takes about 1 second, which does looks cool at certain moment - you see how letters are being drawn on the screen, but absolutely not cool for long-time usage.