William Chops Westfield writes:

> The subject item arrived today, and I gotta say it's pretty a pretty
> neat idea.  Cypress has combined one of their SMT PSOC chips with one
> of their smt USB chips on a tiny little board approximately the size
> of a wide 28pin DIP.  With pins, so you can plug it into a 28pin socket.

One of the first things I did when I decided to get back into hardware
(microcontrollers in particular) was to pick up a copy of Circuit
Cellar -- #169 with the PSoC article and advert.  Just for shits and
giggles I applied for contest sample and it arrived in less than a
week!  I *did* submit a pretty good proposal, which is actually a
re-implementation of a circuit I built using discrete components many
years back.  Unfortunately, I've been too busy getting up to speed
with the SX to to actually play with the PSoC yet.

> So what you have is essentially a 28pin PSOC chip that you can program
> by plugging it into a USB port; no other programmer required.  It 
> reminds
> me of those Z8s with piggyback eprom sockets, only this is neater.
> 
> It's also clever marketing-wise, perhaps.  It's a 'chip' genuinely 
> useful
> for evaluation, but not so useful for actual projects (even for a 
> hobbyist.)

What makes you say this?  I think such an item is *incredibly* useful
for the hobbyist!  I can think of far more cool things to do with this
unit than I'll ever have time to implement!  In fact, if the price
were reasonable I might actually want to pick up a few more.

Perhaps my bias is based on my fear of soldering SMDs.  I'd rate my
PCB soldering skills to be excellent (for DIP components) but I can't
even begin to imagine hand soldering the SMDs as are on the PSoC.

One of the things that I find so striking getting back into hardware
after 20-odd years is how cheap the individual chips are (even at
qty.  1) yet how expensive they get once you provide them on PCB with
DIP connectors.

In fact, I've begun to lust after a little imaginary device that would
have an SX48/52, 50 Mhz resonator, external eeprom and sram, max232
and USB 2 interfaces all on a DIP socket -- something not terribly
unlike the Parallax Stamps, but without any pre-loaded interpreters
and instead the high-speed USB interface.  Designing the circuit would
be nearly trivial, it's simply a matter of the cash to do a production
run.  If cheap enough, and driven by an open-source development model,
I think such an item could *really* take off.

-p.
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