The Cypress PSoC 5LP

I recently started to work on a project that needs several analog input and output channels connected to some sensors and a PID control loop and it will probably work better with 5V than the currently popular 3.3 for Cortex M systems. So I decided to dig out a  CY8CKIT-059 PSoC 5LP Prototyping Kit  that has been gathering dust waiting for the right project to come along.

This is actually an amazing chip, even if the processor is a standard Cortex-M3 that runs up to 80MHz (there are signs that Cypress is working on a PSoC7 with a M7 core and probably a price to match). The 64K RAM and 256K FLASH sizes are modest but what makes this chip special are the configurable analog and digital blocks on the chip. There are three ADC's, one with high impedance buffers, two DAC's and four opamps, all connected to an analog switching network. The digital side has a number of universal digital blocks to implement your own digital logic or preconfigured communication interfaces and a digital filter block, DFB. This is a 24 bit datastream co-processor with a multiply-accumulate unit and a ALU.  The analog and digital I/O can be run from 1.71 to 5.5 volts.

The vendor supplied tool chain PSoC Creator only runs under Windows but it is not a bad experience even though I am always skeptic of systems that generates code that is hard to know where one can change and how. I find it often less trouble to implement stuff directly from the data sheet than to learn the ins and outs of the library calls. In order to use the extra analog and digital blocks in the chip I think it is really necessary to use the vendor supplied toolchain, and without these extras the chip is not very special.

Add the fact that the CY8CKIT-059 PSoC 5LP Prototyping Kit can be bought for $10 this is definitely a system worth trying out, even if USB connectors made from four strips on top of the circuit board is not the most professional and stable connection method. That can be fixed with an old USB cable and a soldering iron, and the price will still be attractive. The on board programmer and debugger is also a programmable PSoC 5LP and could be used for a project requiring very few I/O pins.

Getting started is quite easy, install some USB drivers, the PSoC Creator and PSoC Programmer software with example projects. Open an example project and hit the debug button. I started with the "CE95277 ADC and UART" project and soon had the board sending ADC samples over USB serial to my PC. Getting used to all the tools and panels takes a few days but the help functions are easy to access and components have datasheets and code examples the opens with a right click.