ball-hours

A robot with an enormous fixed grin?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Have you looked at the Cypress PSoC 4? 32-bit ARM and a really nice development GUI.

(I don't work for them)

I was actually talking about you learning a language, but either way.

It is funny how in the forth community Forth is considered to be easy to learn and very facile for many tasks, especially when you need to interact with hardware or anything else where you don't have all the details clearly laid out. But outside that community Forth is treated like a three eyed toad.

I seem to recall that you use the 8051 because you want a 20 year product life or something like that, right? Does that affect your talent pool?

From your web page it looks like you are a half hour east of Sacramento, California in Cameron Park.

I am cross posting to the forth group. Tell us a few details and we'll see if anyone can accommodate your needs.

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Rick

Not intending to rain on anyone's parade. I looked at the PSOC 4 recently and found their IDE to be a bit too isolating. I was just trying to get some code to loopback the UART receive to the xmit and had to go through support to get it up. The problem had to do with using their $4 board with a software bootloader. But I think the best that can be said for their IDE is that it has a steep learning curve for doing work "close to the metal" which I'm pretty sure Joerg will be needing.

Or maybe I just had a bad experience. I'm not sure Joerg will want the PSOCs anyway, I believe he will want the CM4 which includes a DSP like instruction (single cycle MAC) and runs faster. The PSOC4 is a CM0 and the PSOC5 is a CM3. Go figure. Mosts companies try to work the CM number into their product name, lol.

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Rick

That's how good I am... lol

My current product was designed when you could still get a few parts in QFP. Those days are gone now though unless you want 6+ year old FPGAs in your design. I don't mind working with BGAs, but the FPGA companies all are pushing the ball spacing down which means the boards have to be rather fine pitch which drives up the cost of the boards.

We'll see what happens when I do my next design... there are still some parts available in 144 lead QFPs.

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Rick

Are you describing the ballroom dancing you have seen or what you expect of a robot?

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Rick

Am Montag, 13. Oktober 2014 23:54:22 UTC+2 schrieb John Larkin:

Since many devices in BGA packages replicate power and ground pins, none probably wouldn't have noticed if one of them failed. If one out of 20 GND balls was disconnected, you might have a bit more noise.

Andreas

Ok. I understand your problem. I've had problems with the boot loader myself. It works, but it seems to be a bit aggravating. For me, the best way is to use the Miniprog3, but, as I recall, you did not want to make the investment and I can understand that. It is a powerful chip for the price and really worth the effort in both learning and cost, IMHO. It is a bit surprising as to what we have accomplished with it.

So, ball-hours would be MTTP (Mean time to pumpkin).

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John

I would be more interested in it if I had someone who could show me the ropes on the IDE. They provide a lot of functionality with very little effort, but I need to understand what is happening in their code to be confident in a design. The tools seem to prevent that.

I got my code working and turned it over to the guy who is porting Forth to their boards. He started tearing apart the assembly code and found some start up stuff that seemed to blow his mind, something about the interrupt vectors. It has been a few weeks, I should ping him again to see how it is progressing.

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Rick

I would be glad to help you get started if you want to use the miniprog3. Do you use Skype?

The only language I'd rally like to learn is Spanish :-)

But seriously, I do not want to get too involved in the actual programming job because I am fully loaded with analog/mixed projects already and want to reserve at least a few hours per week for mountain biking.

Problem is, there is no Forth community out here. The last die-hard Forth aficionado I personally met was about 30 years ago in Europe.

Not on this project but otherwise, yes. One of my designs containing an

8051 will celebrate its 20th next year. Still in production and no end in sight. Second source is another concern and you can only get that for a small selection of 8051 uC.

For other projects it does. We need to make sure that 10 years down the road it will be possible to find someone locally who can re-write the code. With 8051 that's usually not a problem.

Yep, near Hwy 50 just before Placerville. But the project is already committed to a local guy if he feels comfortable to do it. Which I should know by tomorrow. It has to be local in this case.

Can't reveal too many details but from a code point of view essentially several FFTs, one of them a big one, 1024 point complex (I/Q) every

5msec, overlapping. Extract phase, some complex-conjugate math to extricate component values every 5msec (sort of a poor man's reverse network analysis), followed by filtering, some more math or a LUT, then modulating the result onto an audio carrier. Sprinkled with user interface handling and calibration routines. Back of the envelope calcs indicate that this will reasonably fit into a 100MHz ARM but of course I'd rather have a few more megahoitzes.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

STM32F429 runs at 180MHz, has a serial audio peripheral that afaict would support most audio codecs easily

install GCC and CooCox, get one of these:

$24 from digikey

and you'll be writing code in 10 minutes, and the board will work as a jtag interface when you build you own board

-Lasse

I've had numerous occasions where I asked ST's support a question and ... no answer at all. They just didn't bother. That puts a company on the naughty list here. I will use their jelly bean parts (and just did) because pricing and quality is good but with such a dismal level of support I won't use any of their more serious stuff.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

So would that be a robotess then?

Pretty soon some activist judge will declare the marriage to a robot a constitutional right.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Robette.

Humanoid robots are silly. It makes more sense to build an R2D2 sort of gadget on tank treads, for bomb disposal or such hazardous work.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Technical term is "gynoid".

Also, apparently John is Japanese. ;-) e.g.

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs 
Electrical Engineering Consultation 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

The BGA failures I've seen have resulted from the board assembly house not following the proper solder profile for the device.

In one case, three of us flew to Korea because the customer, a ginormous Korean manufacturer, was insisting that our part was defective under cold testing. It was improper soldering. We found it in about two minutes. Probably cost our company $25K for that little jaunt. But Korea is always nice to visit.

I appreciate your offer. I have other things I'm doing at the moment. I don't have skype, but I believe that is easy enough to fix. I would have to get a miniprog3 too. The cost is not an issue really, I don't have a current need for the PSOC.

Thanks, I'll give you a shout if I get back to the PSOCs.

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Rick