I’m missing my progress bar today. I really didn’t see this coming!

It is not all bad. On the plus-side I am now free to attend meetings in person without carrying around my computer, to wander the hallways with wild abandon, and to loiter in the restroom for as long as I like. On the down-side, everybody now knows that I gave in to it’s insistent demands - especially those with interesting opinions who lurk near the coffee pot. They get me every time!

I can no longer say “Sorry, Adam, I’d love to stay and talk about squeezing more bits out of your ADC, but I have to go rescue my computer from the progress bar” and “yes, I do remember you telling me about those flash retention specs but I just remembered the reboot pixies are about to do a number on my TPS report”.

Long gone are those happy days. I’m easy prey for the opinionated masses who mistake my feigned understanding for interest. I’m feeling sleepy.

Oh progress bar, you do so little but mean so much!

It ended badly – my little battle with the progress bar of doom. I fell for the free lunch trick because the boss was in town. There really is no such thing because, on my return, the reset gremlin had done it’s evil work.

There before my eyes was an empty desktop and the prospect of an afternoon to be spent repairing documents and trying to remember what I was running and where I had put things – all the stuff humans are bad at and computers are supposed to solve for us.

Of course from a software perspective, that is if you ignore the minor issue of the lost hours of productivity, the whole process can only be described a rip-roaring success on all counts. The update completed without me needing to be there (sic). My screen looks the same as it did before. My applications run the same way, and at the same speed. The Internet still carries the football scores and almost nothing else. Email arrives from the same people, reminding me to do the same things I wasn’t getting done before (like writing this blog). Excuse my attitude but, in short, nothing changed. At all. Worth every wasted hour. Thanks.

It could have been worse, I suppose. At least I didn’t have to admit to spending too long in the toilet!

What is it with engineers and toys? You can't keep us away from them. Do we ever grow up?

Sure, we tell everyone that embedded applications are changing the future, connecting people, improving lives, saving them even, but we're not really interested. In reality all we want is a battery-operated controller with some flashing LEDs and a toy car to steer around the office when the boss isn't looking.

My mate Rajesh was in town last week and he told me about his latest pet project - and, yup, it's a toy car. Ever on the lookout for a cheap blog topic I asked him to send me a video, which he duly did, but he also made me promise to give out a big thankyou to his team; Sandeep, Rinku and Sriram. Well done lads, now - all of you - get back to those world-changing engineering projects we pay you for! From this point on I have to pretend to be a little indignant about the frivolity of it all when, really, I am a bit jealous that they didn't ask me to help.

So, here it is. Not the first toy car to be driven by a PSoC and probably not the last. The recipe is simple enough.

1. Purchase one battery-powered toy car
2. Break it - this is traditional engineering practice
3. Rip off the fancy plastic shell - we don't need stripes to make it go faster
4. Apply liberal amounts of glue to whatever you find underneath and attach a FirstTouch kit (zip ties are an acceptable alternative)
5. Insert a WirelessUSB (CYRF7936) kit into the 12-pin connector
6. Do that configuration and software stuff and to program the receiver
7. Find another FirstTouch kit and CYRF7936 and do more of that configuration and software thing to program the transmitter
8. Spend hours driving it as fast as you can around the office - blame the cleaners for the damage to the walls

Here's the video - www.cypress.com/ui/2_5/images/blogs/userfile/ToyCAR640x480.mpg

Anyway, Rajesh will get all grumpy if I do not tell you about how it really works so here goes...

The transmitter uses the accelerometer on the FirstTouch kit to detect the orientation of the board and decide how to drive the car. The accelerometer is connected to the on-chip ADC through a software-controlled multiplexer. The software loop simply switches the MUX between the two inputs from the accelerometer (X and Y axes), reads the ADC, and sends a message (via a SPI interface to the radio) to the car if anything changed. The X axis controls steering (left, straight, right). The Y axis controls direction  (forward, backward) and speed from the angle of tilt.

	The receiver just listens for messages and does what it is told. It uses a control register to drive high/low signals out of pins to set the direction (both off = straight ahead).
The speed is managed with a PWM (pulse width modulator) with a software-variable duty cycle - the greater the duty cycle the faster it goes. Another control register controls a de-multiplexer, which channels the PWM output to the motor, driving it forward or backward at the desired speed.

So there it is - a $10 toy car for only $150! Only one question remains really... Rajesh, where's MY damn car!

We just released a new version of PSoC Creator. Go get it now!

Those of you with the Cypress Update Manager running will be getting notified any moment. Please update your software. We've improved a bunch of features and added a SAR ADC (12bit resolution and 1Msps) for PSoC 5 devices.

Go get it now! Stop reading this silly blog and get your new software! Now! I mean it.

if you do not have it yet, well, shame on you, but you'll be forgiven if you go here and download it.

http://www.cypress.com/go/psoccreator

Now!