Ugh Post. Silicon Labs, Texas Instruments, Atmel, and Infineon
You will see “ugh” sprinkled throughout this post. It expresses dissatisfaction with the state or direction of offerings from companies. Hopefully, some clear thinking individuals with foresight can address and fix these ughs in the future. I will not hold my breath, and at my age, I may stop...
dsPIC and PIC, Configurable Logic Cells
The Microchip family continues to surprise me. Their prices are excellent, they are in stock, and I have known of their use in our extreme temperature environments for a while. In addition to OpAmps, Comparators, A/D Units, DACS, they also have versions with USB controllers and Configurable Logic Cell...
PSOC5, PSOC3, and a Pic, dsPic Surprise
The Cypress branch of Infineon does not trumpet an interesting fact. A PSOC5LP package and a PSOC3 package are interchangeable. So, if you have a PSOC3, you can drop a PSOC5LP in its place and rewrite the code. Or, Vice Versa. The main problem you will have going back...
PSOC And Logic Analyzers
Sometimes the code you put into the PSOC does not work. And you can’t figure out why. Single stepping it with a debugger looks good. But it does not work. This problem has been around for a very long time. Many times we can cause the suspect code to...
Chip Shortages, Part Rescues, And The Green Tinkerer
The tinkerer is the hobbyiest (not a mythical character from the LOTR, woke though it has been morphed). We are talking about the person who loves to tinker and build new things with electronics. Recycling is the green way to go, after all. In addition, you can’t buy new...
World Wide Chip Shortage Means End Of Future Designs from Hobby Users?
The world wide greed for short term profits is eviscerating future designs. All manufacturing is geared towards the multi-million dollar customers. No capacity is left over for the million dollar customers. I counted over 50,000 PSOC5LP orders of various kinds for Mouser. That has a retail value of 1...
PSOC5LP 5 Volts to 3.3 Volts Or Less
The PSOC5 can work with 5 volts or 3.3 volts, down to 1.7 volts. These voltages can exist simultaneously in the system. There are several ways to work with 5 volts and 3.3 volts in a system. Different Voltage Domains If you are designing the board layout from scratch,...
Using KitProg With A 3.3 Volt Target
The KitProg stub on the CY8Ckit-059 board is a 5 volt only board. But, with an interesting trick mentioned by the Cypress user EvPa_264126, you can modify the KitProg stub to work at 3 volts, and safely program 3.3 volt units. These modifications are more or less permanent. Modification...
PSOC5 SAR ADC Trick(s)
This blog entry assumes some familiarity with A/D concepts. See the maxim tutorial linked below for more detailed information. The PSOC5 ADC suite includes 2 SAR (Successive Approximation Register) Analog to Digital convertors. The PSOC5 SAR’s can digitize up to 1 million samples per second. The SAR component allows...
How To Kill Off Future Sales
Infineon appears to be methodically killing Cypress, in my opinion. As you know, I am a fan of the PSOC5 with the PSOC Creator, using VSCode to code/debug on the Mac after design on PSOC Creator, with KitProg or KitProg2 (see previous posts. That introduces some clunky, but with...