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Make is currently holding voting on the PSoC (Programmable System-on-Chip) maker challenge.
Each of the projects entered in the contest had to use the new PSoC 4 BLE Pioneer Kit, a new IoT-focused developer kit manufactured by Cypress. There aren’t a lot of entries in this contest, but they are all really high caliber. And you will decide the final few projects that our judges will weigh in on. There’s one week to cast votes for your favorite project/s. You can cast one vote per project per day for as many projects as you wish through April 15.
The entries include a 'portable ECG monitoring system over BLE,' a 'smart board game', and an 'electric bicycle data collection and logging service for battery health and lifecycle monitoring'.
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PSoC Maker Contest Looking for Votes
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The Official Colorado State Vegetable is now the "state legislator".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:28PM
Do any of the projects take advantage of what the PSoC can do? They all look like arduino/pi ideas that someone rammed into a different system.
The PSoC has some pretty interesting abilities, none of which seem to have been taken advantage of, which is too bad.
I'm not talking about the project ideas themselves, or their implementations, I'm solely complaining about none of the entrants being able to complete a line beginning with "And my project was only possible because of the unique features / characteristics of the PSoC because it ...". They mostly seem to be a living demonstration of why any turing-capable task can be eventually performed by any turing complete architecture, and whatever the hardware microcontroller equivalent is.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:56PM
I agree completely. I visited the article with the question "Oh, what can PSoC do that an Arduino/PIC/etc system can't?"
I still have this question. From taking a look at the wiki [wikipedia.org], the best answer I can come up with is; The same things a normal Arduino can do, but will less discrete components, and possibly a smaller device.
I guess it would be ok for wearables or something where size really really matters. Maybe Cypress was worried that nobody would submit any good entries if they had to demonstrate some usefulness of their system.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday April 08 2015, @07:09PM
Its that they used so little of the chips capabilities that I found it weird.
So you got "up to 72 I/O" so none of the project use more than like two peripheral devices probably one SPI/I2C bus (which the thing can do in hardware)
So you got onboard bluetooth which was leveraged... err most of the entries didn't use it at all.
So you got enough memory for "thousands of LoC" grade problems so the projects are all dozens to hundreds of LoC class of problem.
So you got all this analog stuff, OK, and tons of CPU, OK, so write a software defined radio? Or some DSP code to do .. .something? But no, the projects all require about the CPU horsepower of a 1990s era BasicStamp1.0 and don't apparently use the analog features at all.
You could do cool stuff with that class of hardware, but nobody did. Oh well.
Its like using a top of the line 2015 gaming PC to play "pong". Its possible, but kind of a waste, and the load of the IDE and extra stuff makes it harder than using something right-sized.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:50PM
What's LoC class of problem?
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday April 08 2015, @10:28PM
LoC = lines of code. Large flash memories allow for larger amounts of static code to be ran.
Another benefit is the ability to store large/multiple lookup tables for things like sine waves.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 08 2015, @08:36PM
"Oh, what can PSoC do that an Arduino/PIC/etc system can't?"
It's got built in BlueTooth. That's about the only uncommon feature I noticed.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:15PM
and the integrated programmable analog opamps and comparators and analog routing matrix
and the integrated PLD (read CPLD or FPGA capability)
perhaps features not really needed for the Maker community, but it's great when you want to cut your BOM cost by 50-75% for a mixed mode application.
One of the most unique applications that I have seen is a low-bandwidth O-scope. Use the integrated Op-Amps for a high-impedance input, analog filter, and scaler; run that to the integrated A/D; post-process in the CPU and upload data via USB port.