You have through the end of this weekend to vote for your favorite PSoC 5 Design Challenge entry.  Your vote can help choose the Community Choice award.

The three Community Choice finalists are:

• Electronic Alto Recorder
• Spectral Eye
• Full CAN Bus for Electric Cars

Since I grew up in Chicago, my motto is vote early and vote often!

Rating: (4.7/5) by 3 users

I am pleased to announce the 12 finalists for the PSoC 5 Design Challenege!  The finalists are divided into 4 categories: Community Choice, Best use of Analog, Best use of Digital, and Best use of Components.  Our judges will pick the winners for the latter three, but you can control who wins the Community Choice.  So go out there and vote!

Community Choice

• Touch-sensitive electronic Alto recorder with true analog sound synthesizer 
• Spectral_Eye 
• Implementing FULL CAN bus in PSoC 5 for electric vehicle development 
   

Use of Analog

• Drum Tuner 
• MultiLogger 
• Musical Instrument Tuner 
   

Use of Digital

• Mixed analog-digital scope 
• LIMB – Low-Cost Intelligent Monitor for Babies 
• PSoC 5 Webcam
   

Use of Components

• Electronic implementation of the game “Connect 4” using a color OLED 
• PSoC5 Super Spy Car with Bluetooth control and monitoring by mobile phone. 
• jmSCAG for PSoC 

Rating: (4.5/5) by 2 users

Big news, today we announced our Cortex-M3 PSoC 5 Design Challenge.  This contest is being sponsored by ARM, EETimes and Cypress.  I've been working on PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 for a long time now, and it's very exciting to see them turn into real products.

Today we move one step closer.  We started sampling PSoC 5 this summer, but now it's far enough along for us to kick-off this design challenge with it.  I really hope you considered submitting a design.  The challenge has over $10,000 in prizes.  Even if you are unable to create a design, you can still win money by participating in the Cypress Community.  Even something as simple as rating another's designs might win you money.

If only Cypress employees where eligible...

Rating: (5/5) by 4 users

 You know what I hate?  I mean other than people who tell me that my rare sea turtle collection and accompanying 6,000 gallon fish (turtle) tank is a ‘little too intense’ for an 800 square foot apartment?  It’s trying to figure out which MCU device I really need for a design.  Given when I’m searching for them, it’s mainly for competitive data, but it’s still annoying.

 

Segue into a side project that I’ve been working on: the Electronic Product Selector Guide.  Also referred to as the ePSG since I have a penchant for acronyms that almost rivals my need for ridiculously old Persian rugs (yes, my apartment is decked out with a large fish tank and Persian rugs… trust me, I’ve done it in a really classy way). 

 

The ePSG is a cool tool that allows someone (read: you) to quickly take their basic requirements for a design and have the online tool give you a list of several PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 parts that are suitable for the design.  What really makes this helpful though, is that I’ve removed the need to ‘understand’ PSoC’s analog and digital blocks.  The user can select the number of PWMs, I2C, CAN, PGAs, ADCs, etc that they need for a design, and the tool determines which parts your selections fit into.  The other cool part is that the tool shows you how many of each peripheral you can fit into the superset parts on the fly. 

 

An example: the first image shows the maximum number of each digital peripheral that you can select.  The second image shows that as I select different peripherals, the number of free UDBs is reduced (as shown by the dark grey bar).  Therefore the tool will not let me make any selections that yield no results.

 

Go on and try it out.  I will be updating this tool with more functionality throughout the coming year (along with the help of my web team).  Let me know if you have any cool ideas for enhancements… or don’t.  The choice is up to you.

 Podbelski out.

 

Rating: (4.5/5) by 10 users