Hi, my i have a 12-bit AD-Converter and want to avoid wasting my precious memory space.
Is it possible to put 4k of this 12-bit-word into 1.5k unsigned int (32 bit) variables?
This stuff should be adressable as a kind of ring-buffer.
Think a struct with union should do. But as i'am a relative beginner i'am not sure about the syntax.
Your struct/union concept doesn't work for exactly the reason you have already received. C doesn't have a 12-bit data type, so you can't manage to align any contents of a struct or union at a 12-bit offset.
Whatever you do, any 12-bit value stored in a native C variable (whatever packing/grouping/aligning/... you do) will have to consume at least 16 bits.
The only way to not waste (at least) 12 bits/ADC value is to bit-mask and shift data, so that bits from more than one ADC sample is stored in the same native data variable.
Of course i can do some bit-shifting to pack two 12-bit words in three bytes.
But my hope was to explore an elegant method to let do C that for me.
There's lot of 4-bit nibble stuff in this Forum. For example http://www.keil.com/forum/docs/thread8951.asp
My idea was to access data in an array. Allways having three int ( 3*32 = 96 bits) together. Then having eight 12-bit words inside this structure.
Is this stupid?
Yes it is a bit stupid if there is no data type of size n*4 bits, where n is odd.
If you don't have a 4-bit native data type, then you can't have a union with two nibbles in a byte. If you don't have a 12-bit data type, you can't have a data structure wtih two 12-bit values in three bytes, or 8 12-bit values in a union of 96 bits (3*32-bit).
If there was no need for an array and your only goal was to store nibbles, then you could use bit fields. That would allow you to hide the masking and shifting and store two nibbles in a byte. But bit fields can't span several integers. And even if n*12 bits did perfectly match the size of an existing integer data type (normally 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ...), you can not use array addressing to access these bit fields, so there would not be any elegance.
With a byte array, you could write a #define to set or get an ADC value in the array. However, I'm not too fond of the use of #define to hide code. It has a tendancy to result in a bloody nose somewhere in the future.