PSOC 5LP Hat for a Raspberry Pi

I am the original designer so I have a biased opinion. Hoping maybe I can answer some of the questions/objections above.

Is it worth the money?

It is a bit pricey at $50 (for early backers). The PSoC chip goes (as noted) for around $7. The PCB costs a few dollars (in the under 100 volume), the connectors and hat EEPROM cost another few dollars. It costs around $10 additional to assemble and test the card. So the selling price of $50 is around 2-3x the costs. That's high if it was made in volume and purchased from China. It's not. We build them in my living room. I am going to build around 50 or so of these cards (maybe 100 of them if the Kickstarter goes well) so there's not all that much economy of scale involved. In the end I might end up with $1000 or so profit which will go into my next project.

Why hook up all of the Raspberry Pi GPIO lines?

Think about this one a bit. If you want an input pin connected just connect it inside the PSoC to one of the I/O pins. Same goes for output pins. Just route them through the PSoC. What about Bi-directional pins? Someone mentioned One Wire. The Pi really stinks at interfaces which have specialized timing. You get a packet in on the Ethernet and all of a sudden you are preempted - ouch. That's where the beauty of the PSOC comes in handy. The ARM processor inside the part does a great job in those situations. Try handling the timing of a chain of NeoPixels with the Pi. It's not a great bit-banger. The ARM CPU in the PSOC is great at bit-banging.

Is this just a Marketing Ploy?

Hardly, I'm horrible at Marketing. I just put up projects that I do for myself. If someone else made the card for $30 or $35, I'd buy it and not build it. I think an entire University class could be built around this card. Can you imagine the possibilities of breadboarding a fairly complex design with minimal breadboarding?

But I can just buy the $10 Dev Kit from Cypress!

Of course you can. We did too. That's what got us interested in the part to begin with. Is it a Raspberry Pi Hat or is it a breadboarding tool? If you want to do breadboards, it is just fine. If you want to build something beyond a breadboard that's another story.

Where's the innovation in this project?

That was a real challenge. Took me a couple of weeks of solid Engineering time to figure out just how to program a PSOC from a Raspberry Pi. You see the limitations of the Pi are the unpredictable timing. The Pi doesn't make a great bit-banging programmer. If someone else had already figured out how to program the part, I would have just used their code. Nobody did, though. Took pouring through the Application notes and the answer was there. But not easy to figure out. And what did we do with the answer? We put it up on our github site for all to see. Some clever stuff there? Surely someone else will come along and say that they would have done it better/differently. But they didn't do it. We did.

Doug at Land Boards, LLC (just a guy and his sons who do stuff together).

I don't know. I think I'd feel guilty charging 2-3 times cost for something that I knew was very similar to a dev-board that was one-fifth of the cost unless there was significant value-add.

Especially if you're targetting university classes - in that case isn't it better for them to save money and use the dev-board for a fifth of the cost?

I understand that you went to effort to port a programmer to the 'Pi, but Cypress Semi created the code that it was based on. Many of us here have ported code and share it

for free too.

I still don't get why you'd connect all the Pi's I/O to your project. The reasons mentioned would all still apply even if you just connected two or three I/O between the two boards.

Hi Enrico!

Everyone may implement it differently I suppose, but personally I'd route it all using a few pins, e.g. SPI or UART. For example, there might be 5 million phones in London, but there are not 5 million fiber-optic cables connecting London to NY.

I also get the time is valuable issue, but (personally, I don't expect others to feel the same way) I don't like projects that have a risk that others could be unaware that near-similar functionality products are available at far lower cost. It is the same reason I dislike supermarkets that offer a 500gm bar of soap at a higher cost than two 250gm bars of soap, i.e. relying on people not noticing, and the people that are affected the most are those who are poor at sums. I'm not saying that is occurring here intentionally, it is just an example. Supermarkets do it intentionally as far as I am concerned.

University classes often use National Instruments hardware. They are way more expensive than this solution. This is not what we are marketing to. If it was we would have tried to reach that market. I give it as an example since I have a son at University in Electronic Engineering and the hardware they use is far more primitive and expensive and much less state of the art than this.

I am not hoping that others don't see the breadboard/dev kit that Cypress offers. I am hoping that they do and want something that is married to their Raspberry Pi in a way that doesn't require a bunch of messy wiring and helps move them a step closer to a product and away from a breadboard. Our motto is "taking people beyond breadboards". Yes you could solder the pins on a Cypress Dev module and use a breadboard and for some who just wanted to breadboard something get close enough for someone who is playing around with a breadboard. And, it's still a breadboard.

Now try the next step. Take the Bill of Materials for the Cypress Dev module and calculate the cost it would take YOU to produce that card. What do the two chips cost? What does the PCB, the connectors, etc go for? Cypress has a great price on the dev kit hoping that people will use it to develop an embedded product. You can't reproduce the Cypress Dev kit at 3-4 times the price. Great deal for the developer who likes breadboards. Not good for a real deployable product.

So where, other than the breadboard, is there a comparable product that is near the cost? The Sparkfun PSOC card is $50 and it's claim to fame is that it has Arduino headers.

Doug at Land Boards

Powerful is relative. The Raspberry Pi certainly is faster at 1 GHz or so than a 65 MHz processor if you are counting raw clock speed. But there's something to be said for a coprocessor which is not running a multitasking OS with interrupts from Ethernet, etc. Otherwise the BeagleBone Black with it's two PRUs would have not carved a nitch and the Pi would have swallowed the entire market.

Is the Pi really powerful if an Arduino does a better job of driving a NeoPixel chain with it's tight timing requirements? There's a certain power to be had in doing things with a single mindedness and the ARM in the RPPSOC does that nicely.

There are certain pieces of this market that this card meets. For example, we have sold hundreds of Pi cards which do nothing more than 3.3V to 5V conversion. We've set up this card do to that well. For uni-directional buses this card will hit that target. There's a whole world of legacy 5V cards out there which can't be accessed with most modern processors. The test market for legacy equipment alone is huge. The Pi can't talk to them without voltage translators and this card does that effortlessly.

Not a solution for everyone...

Doug at Land Boards, LLC

What other hat is there for the Raspberry Pi that has a PSOC?

I don't know what to say I feel that's like asking what possible other cars are there with F, e, r, r, a, r, and i in the name.

The dev-board has near-identical functionality, at $10. (In fact a higher-end PSoC) and fits the Pi with 5 jumper cables.

What other hat is there for the Raspberry Pi that has a PSOC?

The PiSoC for example? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/embeditelectronics/pisoc-learn-to-create?ref=users

Not exactly a HAT, but does connect to the Pi via GPIO header and is Arduino shield compatible.

Backed for $49, including MiniProg3.

Yes, I saw the PiSOC as I was getting ready to launch. Nice idea and I really like the classroom aspect. Any card like these cards would be great in a University electronics program.

Still, not a hat. Externally cabled. Same general price range. To me it validates my approach of making a hat instead of an external card. This one really suffers the criticism that it could be replaced with the dev board for $10. After all, this is for a bench.

I spent a great deal of effort to eliminate the extra programmer. Fact is if I trusted the supply of dev kits I probably would not have chosen to get the programming from the Pi working. My concern was that if I got a few hundred backers I would have trouble getting the dev kits to use the programmer part. Plus, they are not without problems including cable length limits. And you've got a messy programmer with exposed pins, etc.

What  I really don't understand with a board like this is the poor provision for mounting. Fine for top of the table playing around but not all that great for deployment in a real device. Again, targeted at a school situation but not even great there since I don't want my dev card sitting on a bench.

Also, their campaign raised an impressive $16K but their fulfillment was significantly flawed. They listed Oct 2015 as the estimated delivery date. Look at their updates. They shipped in May 2016. They were a victim of their own numbers. Not enough to quit their day job but too much to fulfill their commitment.

I've got mine set up significantly different with a history to back me up. We will ship the first 50 boards in July and the next batch in August. Probably early in August but it depends on how many backers come in on the last two weeks.

Thanks for backing Kickstarter projects. Even if they are not mine.

Doug at Land Boards, LLC

Interesting project. Did you get the plus version? Would love to hear more on this when you get it.

Clem

This one really suffers the criticism that it could be replaced with the dev board for $10. After all, this is for a bench.

I disagree, and would rather call it flexible:

• you can easily connect it to a Raspberry using a ribbon cable
• you can connect it to Arduino shields straight on the compatible headers
• you can use it as a standalone board
• you could possibly use it to combine Arduino and Raspberry Pi

I don't understand the "I don't want my dev card sitting on a bench" argument. It's not hard to design an enclosure which can be good looking and functional. And, even though you may not want it, it could sit on a desk. The only difference is that there will be a Pi attached to it.

Also, their campaign raised an impressive $16K but their fulfillment was significantly flawed. They listed Oct 2015 as the estimated delivery date. Look at their updates. They shipped in May 2016. They were a victim of their own numbers. Not enough to quit their day job but too much to fulfill their commitment.

As for the delays: they happen, on plenty of hardware projects, and I don't mind. I backed the idea, wanting to help these guys achieve their goal. They may not have your experience, seen that you have created 20 campaigns, but I'm sure they have learned quite a lot. Perhaps they realised this is not what they want to keep doing, or maybe they will be using that experience for a new project and campaign where things will go better. It's Kickstarter, and I have seen projects do far worse than this. How were your first campaigns? You have to start somewhere in order to be able to learn and gain experience.

Good luck with your campaign, it seems to be going well.

Yes, the $49 perk, PiSoC+ with MiniProg3. I plan on using it in the Pi IoT challenge

Yes, the $49 perk, PiSoC+ with MiniProg3. I plan on using it in the Pi IoT challenge

That was good value, if the MiniProg3 is included too.

Yes it was, only for early birds though.