Tuesday, September 20, 2011

PSoC3 Custom Board - The What,Why,How

I know,long time nothing.That also means I have a lot to write,so I'll start with the current stuff,and deplete the backlog over time.
Update 18 Jan : Here are some pics of the finished board.

A PSoC3 Custom Board.

What?
A self designed PSoC3 board that is open source,prototyping friendly,low cost and can be used with ease(in terms of hardware).

Why?
Apart from the really good learning opportunity this provides,also doing it because I find the PSoC3 First Touch Kit(here) too constrained(specific reference to header layout.) and the DVK(here) too big and costly.Overall,the cons of current kits on offer by Cypress being cost and ease of use.

Also,since I really feel that the penetration for such awesome hardware is minimal among us students,compared to what it can and should be.Again,I'd attribute it to the 2 above factors on their hardware.But that said,CUA(Cypress University Alliance) is a really great initiative.

If people could buy a board for around INR 1000-1200(the Arduino price point),then that'd really open them up to this awesome world,and maximize exposure to *real* embedded systems (Arduino bashing :P )

How?
The basic idea is to replicate the arduino philosophy.By that I mean,chip,power and easy programming,all on one board.Simple to use,hack and modify for custom designs.Aim being to increase ease of use,of which the arduino is an epitome among simple micro-controller platforms.

Since the PSoC3 is no atmega328,this makes this idea all the more interesting,since the power of the PSoC,available at the simplicity of the arduino is a great combo,in my opinion.Thats also my aim for this.

Like I said,Open Source.So all material for this design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I'll be detailing the design process as I live it :)

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