interesting new hardware

[Davor]

They mention low power. Interesting.

[WM6]

If you wish "preprogrammed" processor, then take Intel(...ence) chip.

[fixstuff]

Only downside is it looks to be available in Nov/Dec at earliest. I noticed the Arduino Tre in same article.. http://blog.arduino.cc/2013/10/03/a-...f-arduino-tre/

[Aziz]

Only downside is it looks to be available in Nov/Dec at earliest. I noticed the Arduino Tre in same article.. http://blog.arduino.cc/2013/10/03/a-...f-arduino-tre/

That is also very interesting platform. Has more processing power too.

But one important disadvantage for us hobbyists: The BGA (ball grid array) pinout of the chips.
(What a fail, what a bloody fail!)


Aziz

[greylourie]

hi fixstuff

After experimenting with the Pioneer board, and finding perhaps that you would like to make use of more IO pins on the PSoc5 or just upgrade from the PSoC4 that is onboard.... You could treat yourself to something like one of the Schmartboards or a freeSoC board.

I am so interested in the board you have highlighted. I think for anyone like myself with no code writing experience, the PSoC is interesting option. The fact that you can create or configure hardware devices within the PSoC is its true appeal.

The boards Aziz has highlighted seem to be super powerful platforms, but require someone with some degree of code writing knowledge.

[greylourie]

Is this any use ? Digital Filtering with PSoC. http://youtu.be/2UC4gCohrk8

[fixstuff]

Well, I've been playing a bit with it, and its not quite as flexible as I hoped. The big thing that appealed to me was the Arduino shield interface, which looks to offer a ton of ready to go hardware I can use. The problem is once you get all of the libraries installed to work with the shield - you basically are out of memory on the little guy, not leaving much room to add in more. My thoughts on this board is that it would strictly be useful to me as a "programmable analog" front end for a much higher end processor. There are some projects I'm going to try out with the Beagleboard black and the Raspberry Pi, but my hopes for using much of the microprocessor with Arduino libraries doesn't look to be realistic.

If I can get the PSOC 5 into the picture it might be a different story. It has quite a bit more resources than the 4. I can see most of my projects ending up using the 5 as the high end processor, and the I2C bridge from the 5 to the 4. Its still an interesting board, and its going to take me a while to wrap my brain around what it can do.

The PSOC Creator software is really amazing though. Its really cool to be able to drop in hardware on the schematic, and get it running with a few lines of code in the main.c.

As to the filtering, there isn't any filtering for the 4 other than a glitch filter. The filtering shown in the video is only available on the PSOC 3 and 5. So in order to use the DFB block I would need to use the 5..

[fixstuff]

The FreeSoc looks like a supercharged version - it has a Cortex M3, and it uses the PSOC 5LP by default. Only downside is the $75 price, but I dont have a problem with that. Only thing I can see being an issue is the forum and community support is small - but I can glean a lot of info from the other PSOC communities out there. Thanks for the info on this - it looks to be a natural stepping block from a Pioneer if you run out of resources - especially since you can use a lot more of the 5LP pins on this board versus the Pioneer.

[fixstuff]

Heres the kind of thing thats really nifty to me. I created a simple AND gate in verilog in the PSOC creator, dropped it into a schematic and tied a 500khz clock and a 250khz clock into the two inputs and tied the output to a pin. I also tied the two inputs to pins so that I could view them with my scope. This required 0 lines of code (except for the verilog info). Iv'e attached a couple screenshots of the waveforms and the schematic in PSOC creator...

I actually had to drop the clock speed way down so that I could use my little oscope. Only thing I dont like is the system clock cant be tied to a pin on the PSOC 4 like it can on a PSOC 3 or 5. Have to use a clk input.

[F117]

Nice work

Lately, there was an overview in EDN of the top 10 SBC for under 100$:
http://www.edn.com/design/diy/441999...for-under--100

Regards,
- Bernard

[greylourie]

Hi fixstuff

I think you have displayed a positive feature of the PSoC. To just be able to prototype an idea, then configure in the Creator interface. Wow, few clicks and your idea is up and running. No breadboarding or waiting for parts to arrive in mail. So even if someone is not planning to use PSoCs they can still use something like the Pioneer board to try out an idea very rapidly and with minimal time and effort.

[fixstuff]

Thats what I'm thinking also. I actually tried out the tutorial for the Freesoc to create the verilog part, and did so on the Pioneer PSOC 4 kit to try it. As I'm watching the video I'm thinking, "no way" is it that easy. Yet sure enough, within a couple minutes I'm hooking up the scope to the board and looking at waveforms, and thinking I didn't write a darn line of code to do that. Granted its fairly easy stuff I tested but the principle would be the same for much more complex circuitry. Its just crazy.

I just tried the PSOC 5 part this morning. I used the example project from here: http://www.element14.com/community/thread/25084. It was a piece of cake. Just had the simple fast blinker project to demo it, but it takes the code built and adds a bootloader to it, the only difference is you download the generated code via a bootloader host versus the standard programming button. Just like that, and I'm up and running a POSC 5 project. Its just as easy going back to the default firmware that runs the PSOC 4 stuff. Now that I know how easy it is to jump back and forth between the two, I'm going to go through every single PSOC 4 component and PSOC 5 component and kick the tires so to speak. I'm finding that this guy is really easy to set up. I lose the debugging ability when using the PSOC 5, but I can set up a UART to USB com, and I can get debugging info over the com port to the PC it looks like pretty easily so that isnt a big deal either.

I also got tested the Arduino Ethernet shield last night. It runs a simple web server that lets you toggle the LED between colors. The Arduino compatibility looks to be quite a bit more involved, but the leg work looks to be mostly done, and it worked just fine also. I've got a bunch of shields I'll try with it, nice thing is I have several Arduino prototype shields, which will allow me to build some hardware right off.

[greylourie]

Its good stuff. If I could understand,write and program for Arm and Pic32, I would be trying the things others are doing here on Geotech.

About the PSoC, am I right in understanding that you can change or re-purpose pins on the fly as a program is running. Can this be done with most micro-controllers ? Is it even useful ?

[fixstuff]

I dont know about on the fly re-purposing, although I think I saw that somewhere. Most microcontrollers can do this with normal digital pins, but can't do that for hardware functions built into the chip. These are reserved on particular pins. One exception to this rule is a Parallax Propeller, which can basically have any function on any pin - even on the fly change if you want to. I actually really like Propellers, I'm just waiting for the new one whenever it comes out. The PSOCs actually remind me a little bit of the Prop in that regard.

[fixstuff]

Well, I've kicked the analog around a bit on the Pioneer kit.

The testing I did today was limited to the PSOC 4 which is less capable than the 5LP on board, but here's my thoughts so far. I hate to be overly negative, but I'm somewhat underwhelmed by what I've seen so far. Now granted, Cypress is marketing this chip towards smart appliances and what not, but as for analog its a little on the underpowered side.

It has only 1 current dac (iDAC) and a Waveform Dac (WaveDac), and is limited to 8bits.

The WaveDac appears to be broken at the current rev, which looked interesting since it had an arbitrary waveform capability. I'll try the PSOC 2.2 version just to make sure its not just a ver 3 issue (already found one with ver 3 on the Arduino libraries).

The iDac does work, and I was able to drive a small resistive load (limited to 600uA) through the 8 bits of resolution with no problems. I also tried the Sequencing SAR ADC. It worked ok, except I couldn't select single ended unsigned results, so I lost half my resolution.

Interesting thing about the ADC is it can be 8ch, although I was only using the one.

Other than that the analog hardware was fairly easy to use, although in this case it did require a couple lines of code in the main.c to use them.

I'll look at the Op amps, comparators, and other hardware later, but so far, its looking like an ok solution for simple analog needs but not if high end performance is needed. I think the 5LP on-board might work better for the types of analog we need for detector circuits but I might be wrong. I will keep working for a while yet with the Pioneer to see how far I can get with it.

For only $25, its a heck of a learning tool though. I'm playing around with hardware that individually would cost me $200+ in separate components, so I'll keep on it. Even If I don't use this particular board on a project, the PSOC chips are quite interesting.