It's halloween and we decided to build an all-new Sparky for our party this year. For those of you who don't remember (i.e. everyone), Sparky is a life-size replica of a death row inmate about to get fried in an electric chair. Well, to be honest, he was an already-fried victim who got re-fried repeatedly over the course of the night. This time we swapped out the fleshy head and hands for a cleaner, more skeletal look and a new Department of Corrections jump suit. We thought it was quite fetching.

It's a bit of a process getting Sparky set up. He is basically garden sprinkler piping with foam to make him comfy to sit on. He also sports an anatomically correct skull and hand bones! Adding to that he has PSoC-powered LEDs in his eyes and nose (well, where his eyes and nose should be), a PSoC-triggered light in his skull (brain optional), and a really loud, vibrating motor in his chest.

So, here we have a scary-looking guy with big padded legs, just asking for tired party-goers to take a quick rest in his lap. And that's where the PSoC proximity-sensing comes in. Some users use our technology to detect a mouse's finger pointing at a screen, underwater, from a range of 100 yards. Not me. I detect bottoms. A wire, running up and down his legs creates a nice clean signal to the PSoC device for even the boniest of backsides. After a brief pause, to lull the victims into thinking they're safe, Sparky bursts into life, or rather death, with an exploding cranium, fire in his eyes, electric shocks running through his whole body and one very surprised guest!

Here is a link to Sparky doing his thing...www.cypress.com/ui/2_5/images/blogs/userfile/IMG_0106.MOV

PSoC - scaring the hell out of my guests since 2009!

We've had two great days at ESC in Boston this week. We've shown three demos that each highlight a particular core value of PSoC; Integration, Acceleration and Innovation. For the Acceleration theme we showed how easy it is to design a fan controller circuit and extend it when the requirements change. In PSoC Creator 2.0 we include a Fan-Controller component that supports up to 16 PWM-controlled fans. In the demo we showed how to monitor temperature sensors and automatically run a pair of fans to keep things cool. We used a heat gun to warm things up and I can confirm that heat guns make very, very poor hair dryers. I'll heal. Anyway, back to the demo, the acceleration part comes in when the design requirements change and you need to add an extra fan. With PSoC you just add a third connection to the fan controller, connect up the pins, and it's done!

Under Innovation, we showed a combination of on-chip analog DAC components that only PSoC can do. First we DMAed sine waves of different frequencies through the DACs, and then wired them all together to create a combination output square wave. We used the Oscium oscilloscope (which happens to be PSoC-based too) and an Apple iPad to display the results.



I think our best demo, though, was a PSoC-powered quadrotor helicopter - that we had to strap down to the podium to stop it from flying off - because it hows how a single PSoC has replaced five fixed-function MCUs (one for each DC motor and a master). PSoC has always integrated on-board peripherals - now it's integrating whole MCUs! It was also fun to dare people to stick their fingers in the rotor blades... how old am I?

No, I do not mean "webinars are innocent". I mean we're running some educational PSoC webinars and they are free. So check this web page to see if one interests you...

http://www.cypress.com/?rID=51939

Make sure you bookmark the page or, better, add it to your favorite Internet news feed so you'll see new dates and topics.