[sdiy] Microchip DSP kit $60 > AVR32

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Mar 23, 2008, at 7:06 PM, Joe Grisso wrote:

>    With all this talk of *AVR* architectures, ARM, DSPic, etc. I'm
> surprised nobody's jumped in with Cypress PSoC family. The nifty thing
> about the PSoC is that it's like a combination of MCU + FPGA/FPAA
> resources. The programmable hardware blocks have various functions you
> can use - encoding/decoding, ADC/DAC, filtering, etc. They're also as
> cheap to develop with as AVRs, with a starter kit running about $30US,
> which includes a programmer. Dev tools are free too... quite noice!

I did a simple little digital VCO with a PSoC a few years ago:

http://home.earthlink.net/~ebrombaugh/synth/dvco.html

It was my 'freshman' SDIY project and a good introduction to the ins &  
outs. I like the idea of the PSoC, but the MCU is a bit underpowered,  
especially when it's running ISRs to handle all the housekeeping for  
the various peripherals. The ADCs & DACs are built out of Switched Cap  
blocks and don't have particularly fast conversion times either. It  
would be great for low-speed CV stuff thought - LFOs, EGs, etc. and  
I've got some ideas on the back burner for going further with some of  
those functions.

Eric