Tuesday, January 17, 2012

EzPSoC3 - Pictures


Here are a few pictures of the EzPSoC3 board:



Click to view them full size on Picasa Web Albums.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

PSoC3 Hardware - Quick and Dirty - Fab & Testing

Following my last post on a simplified PSoC3 board,a friend of mine re-designed it,and sent it over for testing.
Here are some pictures,linked over from his account on fabricating this:
and in its coppery glory,
(I don't have access to a camera,so you'll have to put up with my wacky narration.)

It was now my turn to add the chip and program this one.I had some issues with VCC-GND shorts(yeah,theyre the worst) beneath the chip(no soldermask,eh?),so I had to desolder the chip once and then do it again.Now,desoldering this seemed like a near impossible task,but I used this method here(Youtube Video Link) and though it looked impossible to me,it worked just as easily as the video shows!..

So a after a few tense minutes,and the 'Aha!' moment of eliminating the short,and then getting the chip back where it belonged,I found I had a short again.Examining the tracks revealed that the initial short had burnt up a small bit from each of the VDDD and GND pins and they were sitting in a black pool of flux.Since I didn't have any solvent with me,I tried flooding the pins with solder and then wiping that area clean with some solder wick.The mess was cleaned up,to reveal a small bit of track missing from each of the VDDD and GND pins.So I lifted those up with tweezers and re-wired them manually to their correct locations.

With that done,though it looked ugly,it behaved beautifully.The MiniProg3 picked it up easily,and I was successfully able to program the bootloader in,and then a simple LED blinking bootloadable,with surprising ease.I must say,this USB bootloading stuff(Appnote link) is pretty neat!

So the point is,a single sided,easy to use PSoC3 board with USB Bootloading? No sweat.

I'll clean up the files and upload them soon.The files(PCB files made in EAGLE V5.8.0 and Bootloader Project,made in PSoC Creator 2.0) are linked here,from my 4shared account.

Heres what it looks like after those few crazy hours:




Feel free to send in suggestions,criticism,feedback via the comments.

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

PSoC3 Hardware - Quick and Dirty

(Part 2 of this post,PSoC3 Hardware - Quick and Dirty - Fab & Testing. )

One boring sunday morning,I decide to throw together no frills,basic PSoC3 hardware,that could be truly home manufactured,unlike my last attempt.Done in under 2 hours with some bad shortcuts,I decided to call this a Quick and Dirty version.I think this should be do-able with the traditional toner transfer method on a double sided copper clad board.



A few notes on the design:
-P15[0] and [1] have not been routed out.
-Currently,the chip pads are just long enough (and maybe shorter than they need to be for those new to SMD work),so you might need to bend the pins on the chip inwards and then solder,for an easier fit.
-There is no protection on the USB power lines,so beware.
-There is no reverse polarity protection over the unregulated input "VIN".
-There is no dedicated programming header for the MiniProg3,so that something that you've to connect with _short_ single wire connectors.(short because those lines will be in high frequency data lines,min. 1.5Mhz.)

A few notes on fabrication:
-The LEDs need to soldered on both ends,so they shouldn't be inserted fully flush with the board surface.
-The 2 10uF capacitors need not be soldered on both ends,since a connected via is provided for each,which will need to be done.
-There are no vias beneath the chip,and only 2 vias are position critical.
-There are no components on the bottom layer.
-Feel free to increase the via diameter,I've kept it to eagle's defaults.
-Dont make those holes beneath the miniUSB connector.I couldnt find a MiniUSB connector without those holes in a reliable and marked pinout,so I've left it that way.
 
The design files are made in EAGLE V5.8.0 and you may find them in my 4shared account,I'll upload them soon.

Any mistakes,suggestions,criticism or your experiences making this or similar hardware are most welcome in the comments :-)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

MiniProg3 + EzI2C + ADC = Crude O'Scope

I'm documenting something here that I did recently,which was setting up a crude oscilloscope( real-time waveform viewer could be a better term ).While such data acquisition systems aren't difficult to put together,especially with the PSoC3,but I wanted something quick,so this is what I threw together.

I utilized the USB<->I2C bridge functionality of the MiniProg3,and used the Bridge Control Panel that comes with PSoC Programmer to view the ADC data sent over I2C in realtime,to the PC via the MiniProg.So yes,its quite simple and took me under 20mins to get going.

 I'd like to talk about EzI2C Component,since I find it to be truly "Ez" to use and also a great idea.In short,This component adds an I2C slave device with one or two I2C addresses. Either address may access a memory buffer defined in RAM, EEPROM, or flash data space. EEPROM and flash
memory buffers are read only, while RAM buffers may be read/write.This memory is therefore "common" to both PSoC and other devices on the I2C bus,so its really good and easy for implementing control and status as well as data transfer,since all the I2C stuff is taken care of below the high level APIs,leaving you to focus on things better.

You can check out the video in the link below,and its example project included with Creator 2.0

Video : EzI2C Slave Component in PSoC 3 and PSoC 5

Below is a screenshot of the Bridge Control Panel showing the waveform:
Just incase youre wondering,the blue line is a "flag" I set at 50% of the max value,in the Bridge Control Panel GUI.

This code was tested on the CY8CKIT-030,and was written in PSoC Creator 2.0 and Bridge Control Panel 1.3.

Heres what the top design view looks like:

You can find the code and Bridge Control Panel Command and Settings files in my 4shared account,linked here.

I havent gone into details on how to use the Bridge Control Panel,since I found the included help files are good enough.However,if you want a clarification at any point,drop a line in the comments.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.