SmarterLife Challenge - geocar update

This has been a great week, I got to install the PSoC Creator and downloaded my first program. Started with the sample capacitance from the demo and right away moved into what will be part of my project.

First I dropped a UART box in the designer, changed the baud rate and moved into the C part. Used an UART example and the documentation for the tool to guide me. I took me about half an hour or so to get it running but that was very quick for me considering this was my first time using this device.

For testing I used a USB to serial TTL dongle from my PC, opened the virtual serial port created for this device using putty and started typing. By using the PSoC debugger pretty fast I could make it run. Then moved in with the bluetooth adapter. From the PC side, changed the USB to TTL for a USB bluetooth dongle. And same procedure with putty obtaining flawless result.

Here is a picture of the PSoC with the bluetooth device. I decided to use the lower pins just because of my Arduino background. The UART using as of now is a software serial, which works like a charm.

My next step this week is getting some code in the Android that communicates with the PSoC. The Android code should not take long. Moving with the Android since where I am now I have limited components.

Once I get home back from my trip I plan to hook up more devices to the PSoC. Cannot wait to see it collecting GPS data and recording it to a SD card.

The resistors on the bread board are just left overs from past projects. All connections are straight, just VCC, GND, TX and RX.

This is an amazing device and I will try to push it to the limit, to get as much as I can from it. Pretty sure it can handle all that I need from it and more.

It might be my lack of experience with other boards but this one feels like a nice product to work with. The designer works good, the board was just plug and play and there is a fair amount of documentation and growing.

Good luck to the rest of the participants and to everyone using this board. Future posts will have code and more details.