TechCon3. It's a conference, not a security alert. Actually it's a friendly (i.e. free beer every evening) annual event, hosted by ARM Ltd., and held in the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Since we announced the PSoC 5 (powered by an ARM Cortex-M3) platform last month this was a great opportunity to show off PSoC Creator and the new devices. It was really good to see PSoC 5 silicon working in all the three demo stations we had running in the booth.

I can't say I was as excited by having to break out the dress shoes, khaki pants and corporate apparel again. And I wish a very itchy disease on whoever decided that we did not need chairs at the demo stations. But now I can feel my feet again, I think it was worth it.

No more shows for a while now. It's back to the usual corporate wear - sweat pants, faded Motorhead T-shirts, and the orange crocs^TM for me. Hold yourselves back, there, ladies!

I'm moonlighting this month. Literally and figuratively, I suppose. It's halloween and time for my annual (unpaid) software development projects. Get it? Halloween and moonlighting! Never mind.

Anyway, every year, a  friend of mine by the name of Oscar puts on a lavish Halloween party featuring all manner of ghostly props, industrial lasers, an excess of 80s music, and fair sprinkling of assorted pyrotechnics. I'm usually asked to help and, since he serves my favourite beer (i.e. free beer), I'm more than happy to write a bit of firmware to control some of the props.

One of the perks of working for Cypress is free (that favourite word again) access to hardware; in this case pre-release PSoC 3 FirstTouch kits. These old boards are no use to man nor beast - but are totally invaluable to the un-dead. This year has a proximity detection flavour and I'm working on the "sparky" project. Sparky is a full-sized man, with a schedule 40 (lawn irrigation) pipe skeleton, who wears prison clothing and sits in an electric chair with what looks suspiciously like a sieve from Oscar's Mum's kitchen on his head. It's more effective than it sounds (after it goes dark and the Jell-O shot count goes up) and my job is to high-tech him up bit.

It turns out that Sparky is a big hit with the girls. It's that wierd prison inmate infatuation thing I guess. Whatever the reason, they just cannot resist sitting in his lap and trying to cheer the poor chap up. This time around, they're the ones who might get the shock. No, I'm not going to use PSoC to fry the guests (maybe just one or two).

A PSoC 3 kit, discretely stashed in his pants where Sparky has, shall we say, more room than tghe rest of us should be the perfect way to detect an incoming bottom. Wait a second or two, just so they're comfortable, then boom, on go the lights and sounds. Bright red LEDs will flash under the helmet, a panic-inducing strobe will go off, and booming klaxon sound should do the trick.

Marvellous stuff! I'm still figuring out how to sync up a camera with all this but I'll fix it somehow. A full report will follow in a couple of weeks...

Well, ESC is all done now and I'm back home. I'm out of the regulation khaki pants. I can feel my feet again. And, best of all, I'm no longer dressing in corporate Cypress marketing-ware!

As for the predicted gittish behaviour I have to report a complete flop on my part. No lobster. No belt-busting steaks. No late night poker debt. And no "what happens at ESC, stays at ESC" stories to be worried about. It's probably a good thing. You only get one shot to launch a new product and we all wanted to make sure it went well.

Here's a couple of pictures of me making a presentation in the booth. I'm explaining how PSoC Creator is going to revolutionize the embedded world. Judging from the crowd at our theatre and the empty aisles all around us, I think we may be onto something!!!

Is "Out of Office AutoReply" the most annoying software in the world? it really means "I will not be reading your message for a while, if ever, and here are some people who won't respond either. Have a nice day". It has some quality competition, of course.

I am no Microsoft-hater but my personal anti-favourite is the Windows networking message "You have little or no connectivity". This one really bugs me since it so unhelpfully dodges the issue. As far as I can tell it only happens when your PC has failed to get an IP address and is not connected to the network. Your connectivity is not limited. It is non-existant. Nothing is getting through, matey-boy, but we're not going to tell you why. In some bizarre attempt to soften the blow of having to address a problem someone decided that the best plan is to simply not tell you anything about it. Not helpful! In England, people who write software like this are known as "gits". I've found no reliable translation into American but it is one of my favourite words so please feel free to insert your own desired meaning and use "git" liberally.

Anyway, I am travelling to ESC in Boston today and so it is time to set up the "Out of Office AutoReply" message, ignore email for three days, pig out on expenses-paid lobster, and generally indulge myself in some quintessentially gittish behaviour!

One of the great things about the PSoC 3 devices we just announced is the built-in JTAG debug block on every device. There is even a 2-pin mode so you get complete control over the device without having to use up a lot of chip resources.

It's so different from the old days of debug monitors connecting to workstation-based debugger tools with a serial cable. My first real embedded project was to write a monitor for the AMD 29000 microprocessor. This dates me a bit since AMD discontinued the product in the early 90s. But that's enough about my personal problems.

Anyway, I liked the CPU but, as a first project, this one kinda sucked. It's tricky to debug a debugger because, by definition, you have no debugger. It's chickens and eggs. Carts and horses. Twenty two very annoying, unavoidable catches.

So maybe I am biased (as well as old) but I think everyone should appreciate getting to use all of our on-board flash, and RAM, and interrupt vectors, and UARTs. I hope I never have to debug another application with a software monitor. I certainly don't want to have to write one!