FreeSoC

[Scott Penrose]

I have read about and wanted to play with the PSoC chip.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18182218/freesoc-and-freesoc-mini

BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, recently the discussion on Super Raspberry Pi - has their place and are useful and interesting projects. But they are not what I think of as embedded. They are high memory, high powered, good GPU devices. They are good computers, good controllers for complex things like 3D printers, good Media systems, good for video control. But I would not use them in the vast majority of my projects mainly due to power consumption, and their operating system (Linux is a powerful multi skilled trade expert with her own lathe, plasma cutter and CNC machine, when I just need a hammer - yes you can bypass it, which is hard on BeagleBone and much more difficult on Raspberry Pi due to licenses).

Anyway, cutting a long story short. The PSoC chip has some very interesting specs. And this project could make it more accessible. The Arduino ARM versions are interesting from an ARM perspective, but these chips have some very interesting programmable hardware.

Scott

[David Lyon]

Fair enough.

But it DIY microprocessors are going to need some expensive tooling I
would have thought.

Not that I'm against having those tools.

Since we live in the future maybe we should make our own SOC's - lol.

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[Clae]

Looks like the Kickstarter devboard kicked someone at Cypress in the *ahem*
... into action ;)

http://www.cypress.com/?id=2218&source=buy

http://www.cypress.com/?rid=77780

The FreeSOC boards are shipping now too, from http://moeller.io

Clae.

On Monday, October 1, 2012 8:37:27 AM UTC+10, Scott Penrose wrote:

I have read about and wanted to play with the PSoC chip.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18182218/freesoc-and-freesoc-mini

/

[Scott Penrose]

Excellent. $25 good price point too. Look forward to trying one out. Also keen on the claimed low hibernate of 150nA. Could be a good choice for me if we do Antarctic work again instead of two separate CPUs, but only if I can add enough ram to do the large calculations. 

I ordered a FreeSOC - they are a lot more expensive, and have not compared specs yet - but will be enough to understand it.

Ta

Scott

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[David Lyon]

Well $25 is certainly better than what they cost when the core's first came onto the market:

 - http://old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=565&st=1

They were originally priced around the $2750 mark.

[Darren Freeman]

On Wed, 2013-04-10 at 17:27 -0700, Clae wrote:
> Looks like the Kickstarter devboard kicked someone at Cypress in the
> *ahem*
> ... into action ;)

Well, I can't find anything more than press releases for the PSoC4
family.. I can't even pin down how many comparators or how many gates
worth of FPGA the $25 dev kit has.

Until the ability to pre-order the dev kit actually goes live, it's
vapourware :)

Very exciting vapourware, at that, but if you go to Wikipedia's page on
vapourware you'll see that it usually is very exciting at first.

Have fun,
Darren

[Clae]

On Thursday, April 11, 2013 10:39:45 AM UTC+10, Scott Penrose wrote:

I ordered a FreeSOC - they are a lot more expensive

Ah... I guess you ordered before the price drop then.  They're $49 and $79 from moeller now.  The cheapest currently available dev boards from Cypress are $49 and $99.

The $25 board is on pre-order through Element 14 as of a couple of days ago when I last checked, so I guess that counts at "not vapourware".

[Clae]

On Thursday, April 11, 2013 12:49:12 PM UTC+10, Darren Freeman wrote:

Well, I can't find anything more than press releases for the PSoC4
family.. I can't even pin down how many comparators or how many gates
worth of FPGA the $25 dev kit has.

Cypress' website is a mess.  Looks great, functions like a cow.

[Clae]

8051 cores are only in the very lowest end devices.  The rest are ARM based. 

And it's really the configurable logic / analog stages that make this range interesting, more than the core; they offer an intermediate technology between FPGAs and microcontrollers, with a little bit of the best of both worlds - fast, fixed silicon cores with known codebases and toolchains, and the flexibility of designing your own glue, on a single die.

To get that sort of mix on die previously involved going for something $$$ like the Xilinx Virtex range, with embedded PowerPC cores and a huge FPGA - overkill for most hobby-level projects.

The actual ICs will be far less than $25 apiece, I'm sure.

Clae.

[tubular]

It's dangerous to try and guess what Cypress will charge once the devices hit market.  I watched the Psoc 3/5 release from a distance, and the marketing guys were out way too early compared to physical devices, and the pricing wasn't very sharp once released.  They are still something like $12~18 per device.  So the $25 board that seems to contain both Psoc4 and Psoc5 is good value.

However some of the analog performance on the Psoc5 devices seems to be very good and stable, especially for a mixed analog/digital die.  

I can bring in the Psoc3 and/or Psoc5 eval kits if anyone wants to play

cheers

Lachlan