Circuit Lake

FreeSoC is an open hardware educational microcontroller development kit using Cypress Semiconductor PSoC 5 microcontrollers designed by Jon Moeller. It has 60 general purpose I/O pins, 8 special I/O pins, and a direct USB connection to the PSoC 5 microcontroller on board. It comes with an Arduino compatible pinout, as well as five 10-pin expansion headers, each breaking out 8 GPIO, power, and ground.

Typical microcontrollers have fixed-function peripherals for functionality like ADC, DAC, PWM, SPI, I2C, etc. The PSoC 5 microcontroller used by freeSoC gives designers the flexibility to use ANY pin for ANY purpose. The PSoC 5 contains dual 12-bit 700kSps SAR ADCs, quad 8-bit current DACs, quad op-amps, and a flexible array of 24 digital blocks which can implement any digital interface.

Using a drag-and-drop interface, designers can add these components to a graphical block diagram, route the inputs and outputs to any available pins, and program functionality using well-documented APIs for each component. It completely changes the game of embedded hardware design, allowing the designer to configure and reconfigure all their hardware in software, without ever making changes to a PCB or re-wiring a circuit by hand.

Need a 16-input analog multiplexer? Just add it to your block diagram. Need a transimpedance amplifier? No need to shop around for op-amps, just drag-and-drop and you’re done. Download: Schematic & PSoC Creator