Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

The PSoC is an interesting animal. Really shouldn't be compared with the Arduino other than the fact they have 8-bit processor cores in the 20-40 MHz range.

The real beauty of the PSoC comes from the things you can do when you hook up the internal analog and digital blocks in interesting ways. Take a look at this example from Cypress:

http://edn.com/design/medical/4421721/Product-how-to--Heart-...

Look at figure 4. Everything not in dark blue is in the PSoC Creator IDE to hook up different blocks on the chip and wire them to do some of the processing that you would normally offload to some other chips in your design. This is how they do CapSense with a minimal amount of external parts. There's lots of tasty A-to-D and D-to-A stuff on here. You can also do all of this stuff at the register level if you think the IDE is not your cup of tea.

USB is also very very easy with this part. You can have a HID device running in a half hour when you use their wizard and then flesh out the stubbed routines it creates for you.

The 4 & 5LP are 32 bit ARM, the 1 & 3 are 8 bit.

Ayup. Sorry. And the PSoC1 barely deserves the name '8-bit', it's a bastardized version of 8051 that Cypress calls M8C. It's nasty.

You wouldn't happen to know how close these ARM cores are to LPC1xxx or STM32? Would it be worthwhile to port Chibios to them?

Cool, the Pulse Ox link at the bottom of the page is even better (and iirc you can use the pulse oximetry information to calculate heartbeat too). Low-cost wireless version with decent battery life would be fantastic.

So it has some sort of CPLD-like functionality internal to the chip to map pins to logical units? Is there somewhere that you've seen that lists all blocks you can map pins to?

> So it has some sort of CPLD-like functionality internal to the chip to map pins to logical units?

Yes:

http://www.cypress.com/psoc/?source=CY-ENG-HEADER

> Is there somewhere that you've seen that lists all blocks you can map pins to?

Yes:

http://www.cypress.com/psoc/?source=CY-ENG-HEADER

I think this must be a standard ARM thing. The nRF51822 Cortex M0 (with BLE) from Nordic can do something very similar.

They call it PPI (Programmable Peripheral Interface). All the peripherals (timers, ports, low power comparator, even a quadrature decoder) have "events" and "tasks" and you can wire them up as you please. It's pretty neat. Doesn't have any op-amps or capacitative sensing circuits though.

> I think this must be a standard ARM thing.

What your describing is just configurable IO pin routing and peripherals with DMA. That has been common for decades and has nothing to do with ARM, nor is it at all related to Cypress's PSoCs.

The PSoC has an internal switch fabric as well. You aren't just muxxing various blocks to certain pins (e.g. Pin 2.1 is either GPIO, SPI CLK, or UART TX), you can wire blocks to each other internally and then send the output or input to a large choice of pins on the outside.

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