Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Building Projects with Cypress PSoC”.
Hi, my name is product marketing manager at cypress, semiconductor and we’re here at maker faire, to talk about cypress’s, embedded products for professionals and also for makers. One of the products that we’re talking about is psoc, which stands for programmable system on chip. It’S a microcontroller class based product, but with a varying degrees of flexibility around a standard microcontroller as opposed to a standard mcu. A psoc offers you flexibility in terms of analog resources, additional blocks, communication capabilities, including bluetooth, wireless, to essentially build single chip systems that integrate the function of a lot of different ics into one tiny small package allowing you to make smaller products, products that are better in Battery life and products that really help you innovate and make something that differentiates. So the difference between a psoc and a standard microcontroller stems from the from the origins that, in a standard, microcontroller is usually a fixed function. Piece of hardware in terms of the periphery around it with the psoc. The design paradigm is more like an fpga, where it’s a open fabric, where you, the designer you, the engineer, can start populating that fabric as you want. So you decide what that chip looks like internally, how all the blocks inside the chip are interconnected and also how that those blocks and those those peripherals route outside of the chip. So every time you program, the flash on a psoc, which you know literally, is a 10 seconds of a task.
You have essentially redesigned the hardware chip by doing so so that that degrees of flexibility is really how our psoc is is different from other microcontrollers, and then to complement that on the software side, we have our own ide called psoc creator, which allows you to do The whole design in a schematic based capture tool, so you’re visually, designing the way you think about your system uh, rather than looking up documentation and register addresses and so on. So that’s that’s. The whole story behind you know we’re a professional engineering company who’s been in the silicon valley for 30 plus years, working with the top names in the consumer, automotive, industrial and space, and so on. We want to bring our technology, our professional grade technology to the makers and the hobbyists and the di wires.
So the first thing we did was we removed that entry to barium our development kits like this. One right here starts at 10 and has a fully featured debug arm, debugger in it, and a cortex m3 based microcontroller things like these. As a fully certified bluetooth, low energy module, that’s ready to go into production, you can buy something like this for 10, as well as well as full-featured arduino, compatible development boards with capacitive touch sensors and a bunch of other sensors around them that sell for 25.
So we’ve taken that barrier to entry into hardware platforms away from the makers instead of uh. You know, instead of them having to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars for hardware and software to learn and get into a new technology. We’Ve made that entry better, really low cost, as with our dev kits that are between five and twenty five dollars and our software tools that are now entirely free.
We don’t charge any money for software tools, they’re free downloads, from our website, cypress.com at maker faire. We’Ve. Actually had this engagement for the last few months, uh we had a new product that came out late last year, psoc4 ble, which is a arm cortex m0 based psoc chip with a bluetooth, smart radio integrated into a single monolithic die. So we kicked off a design contest using our our new psoc 4b elite product and the dev kit that was associated with it.
We challenged the make community to to create iot products and it could have been anything from a coffee mug that tweets its temperature to our design contest winner, who made an e-bike where the psoc does the entire battery management system and relays that information to a cell Phone, so he can log the data see how many miles of range he has left see what sort of charge he has left so on and so forth. So really the the build up from introducing the product to the maker community uh, the maker community, adopting the product trying a few different things with it, culminating into this design challenge where we had tens of different entries, and today we have the winner with us here Today showcasing what he built and we’re also showing off some of our products that we have here at megafloor. We also have our little bluetooth modules hidden around the event space in these easter eggs, and these are essentially acting like bluetooth, low energy, easter egg beacons. You can download our app called cy, smart or scismart available for both android and ios. It’S a free, download and use the app to search for peace out easter eggs that are hidden around the show find these eggs bring them back to us at the booth, and you can exchange them for goodies. It’S been great, it’s been great.
So far we’ve had you know: people in the entire age range from six to sixty um, the the the kids have uh have come over here and played with some of our demos like the nerf blaster gun uh, the adults have come and learned about the technologies. The software tools, the dev kits uh and um – and you know people have come in here already knowing a lot about psoc and the psoc maker community, owing to some of the programs that we were running in the recent past, like this design challenge and so on. .