PSOC 5LP Hat for a Raspberry Pi

Question

I was checking Kickstarter today and found this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/land-boards/pisoc?ref=home_recs.

The project incorporates PSOC 5LP from Cypress on a custom hat. What do you think?

fvan · Answer

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

balearicdynamics · Answer

In my opinion - at least this is the approach I follow - when you startup (not to consider in the common meaning) a project you should consider the work cost, including the prototype creation, design time, experiments and so on, just only as cost of investment. If you produce only 50 pieces or less (I usually start with 10) also by a marketing point of view you can't charge on these first small bunch of units your personal work costs. It is your risk, not a cost. Ignore this then make the right price and add a small percentage of your job/ investment cost. How to calculate the percentage? This can be done before and it is very useful for the future of your product. You evaluate the real effort needed, establish a correct market price and then based on the competitor market price of similar products evaluate the max amount you can charge. For example: Hardware components: 10$ PCB (real price for 10 pieces, this cost will decrease in future with larger productions) : 5$ Wires and accessory cables : 1$ Case or support or just the screw parts; 3$ The total cost will be 16$ You can sell it at 25$ covering also the hidden costs (you will discover them going ahead in the project) and cover part of the job costs. Calculate the hardware costs based on a single unit buying only a set of components (also buying 10 you will pay with a small discount) Make reviews, presentations, how-to and distribute them on sites like Element14, Hackaday.io, instructables.com etc. Write articles and tutorials, create interest on the product that will be attractive as it is cheaper for any potential customer / user than creating one by himself. See what happens. If you sell 1 or 2, you have a small quantity of products in your storage for the future. If you sell all 10 you have a base to start a bit larger production. Take in account two important factors after this considerations: create a shop online (also Kickstarter if you are so aficionado and maybe also on indiegogo.com) before you start the promotion of the project and everywhere - in a very discrete way, don't worry that interested users/customers search for the link - the shop link. I suggest drobott.com and tindie.com but these are just two options. with the costs in mind, you can reasonably calculate the break even point as follow: Suppose that your job cost will be 500$ (but the real cost is up to you). So: Cost of the product: 16$ Acceptable (respect competitors, possibly excluding China) job cost: 4$ Total production cost: 20$ At this point (this is just a suggestion) stay as low as possible with earning margin: it is better earning 1$ from 1000 customers than 10$ from one. The information and product visibility (or self-marketing) moves faster with many users... Multiply the cost for 1.5 (max, better if less). selling cost: 30$ 500$ / 4$ = 125 units you should sell at this price. So, IMHO 125 pieces is not an impossible target worldwide. At least to start. Or to kickstart. (It is the worth to lower the price to 25$ and try to sell 200 units). Just an example, I say, that I hope can explain what I mean. Enrico

fvan · Answer

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.

fvan · Answer

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 differen ce 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.

mcb1 · Answer

Interesting article. Oviously didn't work so well for Dave as the link to his uCurrent device came back with the "Shop Unavailable" message. I know I look at this one sometimes. Typically you’ll try and make sure this figure is just above the one-off parts cost of someone making it themselves (customers will do the math!). So most would rather buy it from you assembled and tested instead of dicking around making it themselves. I did like this one Essentially, you price the product “at what people are willing to pay”. If your widget only costs $10 to manufacture, and you know they will pay $100 for it, then great, your gross margin (essentially your profit) is huge. Followed by this observation In the OSHW industry, where your customers are cluey, you can’t get away with huge markups. Cheers for that link. Mark

dougw · Answer

It is good to see someone connecting a PSOC to a Pi. It looks like it could plug into a Pi Zero - providing a low cost graphics display capability for a PSOC5.

land-boards · Answer

I messed around with that yesterday and in a few minutes got I2C working between the Pi and the PSOC. Documented here . The Pi is set up as the Master and the PSOC as the slave. Nice easy way to drop data between the two.

mcb1 · Answer

clem57 Well done you've successfully managed to create something has had 586 views, a few likes and a lot of discussion. We've also created some advertising for Doug, which may help or hinder his project ... With regards to the Kickstarter and how good/bad it is, there is a good link here to express how yo felt about your experience. Kickstarter Electronics Mark

Jan Cumps · Answer

By coincidence, EEVBlog launched this related video today:

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Jan Cumps · Answer

Related read: from EEVBlog: The Economics of Selling a Hardware Project . It describes what's needed to build a viable business and how not to end with empty - or below empty - pockets (with calculations, rates and traps for young players).

balearicdynamics · Answer

IMHO this is a gigantic bullshit. 1. PSoC5 by Cypress (now cost only $7) has two USB ina just for programming. What differs FSLN the PSoC4 is just that it includes the psiuc programmer (the part that can bw broken from the chip) whike the model 4 only can be programmed with the bootloader or buying separately the programmer. 2. The psoc can be connected easily through extra pins via seria or usb or another couple of ways. 3. Any make is abkw to connect the two devices via usb and access from the raspberry pi the other device. Sound very strange to me if they have ported the psoc creator on the PI (I think it impossoble) So where is the innovatiom? And the sense of this project??? And many other objections can be added... Enrico

shabaz · Answer

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.

mcb1 · Answer

Doug Well done for fronting up and answering the questions posed. We've seen many others simply hide and hope the questions go away and the other backers don't see them. I understand the need to ensure you dont loose money, but I do question any add-on which costs a lot more than the board it's going on without adding significant extra hardware. I have the same issues with Freedom Boards and they are a large corporate who could produce a simple prototype board for a few $. Your breadboard v Hat comment is right, but this site is about Engineers and makers so that argument will always appear unless the cost makes it go away. Good luck I won't be backing it ... because I don't have a use for it. Mark

rew · Answer

When PSOC4 was coming to the market I got myself one. I was interested in the analog configurabiltiy. Turns out I got a 4000 model and the analog stuff requires a 4100 or 4200. The "complete analog configurability" has to be taken with a grain of salt too... For example, you can choose which pin the ADC operates on... Ehhh... Isn't that called an "ADMUX"? The smallest AVR or PIC has that! Oh and then they say: "Supports bootloading over serial"... Turns out that what they mean is that you could write a bootloader and use the expensive debugger to put the bootloader you wrote into the chip and that from then on the chip can self program using any protocol you might want.... Ehhh. Doesn't every microcontroller have that ability? "Supports serial bootloading" to me means that I don't need an expensive debugger. Anyway, I have a Cypress-branded paperweight. It's not good at being a paperweight either. It's too small.

clem57 · Answer

Darn marketing types using the engineering notes. I worked at IBM and saw the same type people do that all the time. Clem

clem57 · Answer

That is a sign of an entrepreneurial type person. One who would rather try many things and fail sometimes rather than waiting for a check at the end of the week. Good luck with this and keep trying. Clem

ravi_butani · Answer

During forget me not design challenge Christian have sent rpisoc boards that uses i2c of RPI for communication.. And powerful APIs are available for access multiple blocks of psoc5lp...

balearicdynamics · Answer

Hi Clem, should I be really sincere? It's in perfect Kickstarter style. As probably you already know (I wrote articles here and there on E14 about this) I am a PSoC lover and I have adopted them for their versatility in projects associated to the Raspberry, the TI launchpad MSP432 and also standalone. As they are small and powerful well adapt to high level SBC. Without creating a campaign, just creating a thing Enrico

shabaz · Answer

Hi Clem! Kind of odd why they would wire the entire 40-pin connector (all 29 I/0 according to the text on that page) to the PSoC chip.. maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see what.. it doesn't make sense to me : (

balearicdynamics · Answer

Hello Doug,

despite the fact that it is my opinion that this post was the worth you wrote it just for first after the presentation article of your project, I consider one of your point of special interest:

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.

IMHO this changes the perspective as (at least by my point of view) the kickstarter phenomenon - and all related backing sites like indiegogo etc. - has none or very low trustability to my eyes. The product - as the facts are - remain almost expensive but probably the most important aspect is that there is no mention of the building details nor the possibility to hack the original version, opening at least a part of the project (or, better, the entire design idea). I think anyway that, maybe with the help of this community a way to make it cheaper with the same reliability can be found.

To be honest I saw the video presentation in your kickstarter page and this was almost evident the discordance with the Kickstarter presentation standard of the other electronic projects / gadgest: all the other are so nice and perfectly done that the first question I ask to myself is always the same: if these guys invested so much creating a presentation of something that does not exists, why don't they save their money and make the project the same? Just the opposite of your case.

About the second point of special interest, where you explain your reasons routing all the 40 PI pins, this sounds reasonable to me but frankly I'd like to have some more details. But I am almost sure that your post got a boost to this discussion and these things maybe clarified soon. If you like this, obviously.

Enrico