I recommend installing 2.1 today (http://www.cypress.com/go/psoccreator) and trying it out. Remember that you can still do breaking moves by presssing the Control key when you move things around (and there is a Tools->Options parameter to reverse the behavior if you prefer it the other way around).

Happy wobbling!

I cannot say I like the name change. Where I come from to "go west" implies a short, uncontrollable burst of lunacy! Maybe that's right after all. Only time will tell.

Anyway, if you're in San Jose and have nothing better to do then stop by the ARM booth and say "hello". There'll be at least one Cypress guy, all kitted out in logo shirt and once-a-year pants, on hand throughout the event to give you a demo and answer any PSoC-y questions you like.

In this Product How-To article Mark Saunders describes a new methodology for doing firmware development for the Cypress Arm-based Programmable SoCs, using the company s PSoC Creator in combination with Arm s uVision IDE.

This time, I am talking about the mechanics of using the µVision IDE to develop firmware for a design made in PSoC Creator. I'm just out to prove the point that you really can do it I suppose.

You can download PSoC Creator 2.0 from our website for free and you can get an evaluation of the µVision IDE from ARM so there go your excuses... go on, download a bit of software and see how easy it is to split hardware design from firmware development on configurable platforms like PSoC.

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!

Maybe you should too?

"In this Product How-To article, Mark Saunders of Cypress looks at the problems of hardware/software co-development from the point of view of the software designer using the company s PSoC Creator to illustrate his exposition."

I really think this is the way software should be developed for a programmable device like PSoC. Well, ANY programmable device for that matter (here I go again). You should be able to use the IDE you want to use, not the one the hardware people give you. Have a quick read and let me know what you think!

We just released PSoC Creator 2.0 and one of the big new features is the abilty to develop firmware in ARM s µVision IDE. This is big leap forward for the tool. You can, of course, continue to develop application code and debug it in PSoC Creator but now you have the choice... and we think that is what PSoC is all about.

You can choose your CPU, choose your peripherals, choose your pins and now you can choose your development tools. If only I could choose my relatives! Anyway, to get back on track, it is still completely free so, no excuses, download the product and give it a try!

Five minutes is not much for a rich subject like PSoC, but it's a really long time to hold in the gut and suck in the extra chins!

It's been a great week at the show as well. I made the PSOC Creator presentations in the booth again - running through ten sessions in two days. That schedule can get a bit mind-numbing but I have realized that my inability to stick anywhere near a script really helps keep the material fresh. No-one fell asleep and we had good crowds every time. Was it me or the dev kits we were giving away? (it was me)!

We ran some cool demos too. Each one highlighted a particular core value of PSoC; Integration, Acceleration and Innovation. I'll write a blog on those tomorrow.

Learning how to use a new software package takes time and can present a challenge. We want to help you get started with PSoC Creator and PSoC Designer as quickly as possible. To kick start that process we are pleased to announce a pair of webinars targeted at first-time users. We are hosting live one-hour training sessions to introduce you to the tools, walk through a live demo, and tell you about other resources you can use to get the most out of PSoC.

The PSoC Designer webinar, for would-be PSoC 1 gurus, will be on Tuesday, May 31^st at 8pm Pacific Daylight Time.

The PSoC Creator event, for PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 fans, will be on Wednesday, June 1^st at 9am Pacific Daylight Time.

These are free events and registration is not required. To join, please navigate to https://cypress.webex.com/ at the specified time and use meeting number 925777058. See you there!

Stop the press – there’s a new release of PSoC Creator out now. It has an improved debugger, with faster stepping on PSoC 5 devices, and beefed-up bootloader support. You now have drop-in bootloader support for all configurations of I2C and USB. Plus, you can choose the bootloader channel at run-time. If your application’s not getting a response on one I2C connection, switch to another I2C channel or try USB instead. With CRC download checking available too, this is the most reliable and flexible bootloader ever.

It’s PSoC – did you expect anything else?

If your Cypress Update Manager didn’t already wake you up this morning with the news go fetch your copy from: http://www.cypress.com/go/psoccreator.

New to PSoC Creator? We are starting up a PSoC Creator webinar series targeted at first-time users. We are hosting live one-hour training sessions to introduce you to PSoC Creator, walk through a live demo, and tell you about other resources you can use to get the most out of PSoC.

Our next event will be on Wednesday, June 1^st at 9am Pacific Daylight Time. This is a free event and registration is not required. To join, please navigate to https://cypress.webex.com/ and use meeting number 925777058.

All I wanted for Christmas was a new PSoC Creator. You're a bit late but I guess that's because you were busy delivering a record number of PSoC chips this year. I just have a heart-warming mental picture of kiddies all around the world tearing apart their smart phones and drilling through digital camera lenses just to get at those lovely PSoC chips. Who wouldn’t?

And now, you’ve dropped off PSoC Creator 1.0 “Production”. No more roughing it with beta releases for me. I’ve got qualified and characterized components, cache support, new dialogs, digital timing checking and it’s awesome!

My Cypress Update Manager tool woke me up this morning with the news and I installed the software right there and then. It took no time at all and was well worth the effort. I’m telling all my friends to go get their copy from:

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

I’ve been a good boy this year (when people were looking) and all I want for Christmas is a new PSoC Creator. I’ve had the old one for months now and I really, really need instruction cache support and cool new parameter editors. Beta 5 is, like, three months old and all the cool marketing people have new products to talk about every Christmas.

How about it Santa? I realize you have to deliver a record number of smart phones and music players and printers and navigation devices and cameras and all those other PSoC-powered goodies first though. I can wait. Maybe you could see your way to sneaking us a new PSoC Creator in the new year then? Eh? Eh?

Apparently two months is too long between blog posts - according to our webmaster - and he says he has photos from the last Christmas party...

Anyway, go fetch Beta 5 now. Really. It's got lots of new goodies in it. You'll like them. Really.

If only I could have read the damn thing. It doesn't have a back-light feature! Luckily I was saved by nature. The sun rose at 3am and my internal speedo re-started itself. Thirteen hours of pedalling later, plus nine rest stops, sixteen bananas, four gallons of water, and innumerable dashes into the forest for a little privacy, I rolled past the finish line and promptly tossed the speedo into the lake.

I recently got back into cycling after an injury lay-off. It was not a cycling injury that caused the problem you understand. It was, in fact, a not-cycling injury. The type that occurs after the truck hits you and you immediately go from cycling to no longer cycling, and then you're injured. Anyway, that's all fixed now and I can do hilarious party tricks with my collar bone. Bonus! It's time to get back on the bike.

A simple, low-tech pleasure you might think? But no, not for me. I bought a new watch instead. I'm not the youngest of my riding friends you see. Nor am I the thinnest. OK, I'm the old, fat one. And with long-neglected thigh muscles, off-the-chart blood pressure, and a dangerously competitive nature I thought it would be wise to go high-tech on the early-warning systems! So I got one of those fancy watches that doubles up as a speedometer, triples as a tachometer, and quadruples as a heart-rate monitor.

It works great. If you define working as measuring time, speed, revolution and BPM! The trouble is, I don't. It's clever software. Reliable and precise. But it doesn't do anything I don't already know about. I know when I'm speeding because the cars stop overtaking me and the police give you that stare. I know what 18mph feels like because it doesn't hurt after an hour whereas 22mph does. An efficient cadence on a bike is between 80 and 90rpm. Lower than that and you either don't get anywhere or your thighs start burning. Go higher and you start bouncing around on the saddle like someone dropped tin-tacks in your shorts. Again.

And then we get to the heart rate monitoring, which has proven educational but now drives me crazy. It turns out that at 120bpm you can have a sandwich and finish a sudoku puzzle while riding along in comfort. At 140 you don't get tired but you do sweat enough that no-one wants to be near you after a while. At 160 you sweat like a frisky racehorse and, like most thoroughbreds, you're only good for short distances. At 180 you're probably defying doctor's orders and have turned an alarming new color but you've lost the ability to read the screen anyway, so what use is it?

This is where the beeping comes in. It's really clever and sets min and max rates for your "work out" (whatever one of those is). But, you stop at the traffic lights and off it goes, beeping away to say "you lazy git, get back on those pedals and put some effort in!". Build up a good rhythm and off it goes again with the warning that you're gonna pop a blood vessel!

That's just a bit too much software for me. It's time to go low-tech again. I'm taking the bike on vacation with me for a couple of weeks. I'm leaving the watch behind.

And the phone. And the laptop. And, oh yes, this blog!

As usual I donned the regulation uniform (khaki pants and Cypress shirt) and hung around the booth pretending to know what I was talking about. It went well. My only slip was an ill-advised assertion that "by 2012 flip-flops will be replaced by Crocs". I thought it was a good theory. The McEnery Convention Center is a lonely place when you're the only one laughing.

While it looks like I have not posted for weeks the reality is that our web software just threw them all out. They were good ones too, of course. Witty and Pithy. Trail-blazing exposes and in-depth analysis. All gone. Along with my homework and the dog's dinner.

I suspect the web server had one of those "reboot now" popups!

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!

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!

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!

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!

But some real people have contacted me with interesting suggestions and I wanted to respond to that. So, thank you for the inquiry, Adam E from the Lake of the Ozarks, but the answer is no, that’s physically impossible and probably not legal.

Junk-mail and stalking aside, there has been a bit of a theme to the emails. Apparently, for a software blog, I’m a little light on, well, software. This disheartens me somewhat because I thought I could get away with it for a while longer. Did you read my bio? And you expected technical depth and pithy insight?

Oh well, software it is then. In the mean-time, while I frantically search for new subject matter, I’ll post a sparky update. With luck it’ll distract your attention from the software thing…

During the beta program we've shown a few close friends the ultrasound pictures and dutifully listened to their advice on parenting (note to beta testers - hopefully, we'll buck the trend on that and actually take notice of what you've been telling us).

Like all mothers I've gained a bit of weight. Sadly, my "bump" is not going away any time soon. It turns out that the gain is more a result of the business travel, late-night pizzas and a failure to give up alcohol than a side-effect of pregnancy. I've learned that when you eat for two, but you're really only one, you end up looking like two.

So, just like the expectant elephant, I'm tired, stressed, and fat. I'm also rather proud. The whole family (aka the development team) is. They're all proud, that is, not fat. Say hello to the world, PSoC Creator, we think you're going to be one of the popular kids!

While I'm labouring on clumsily with this parenthood metaphor it might be more appropriate to say that, rather than being born, Creator is getting "weaned". It's been alive and kicking for a while now so it's time to cut the apron strings and let it go play with the big kids. We think it will fare pretty well.

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!

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...