Tag Archives: Procyon

Free Friday and weekly wrap

Posted on by Brian

It was a great week this week at teho Labs. We got to launch Procyon which has been planned since day 1! No kidding! It was just too expensive a design to kick things off with before I knew if things would sell. Happily there does appear to be a host of people who want such a board. In fact we are down to the last few.

In other news MSP430G2453 has arrived at Mouser because of our order for MSPism. The are a bunch of PCBs that need attention. MSPism’s firmware needs clean up. BluePanel needs releasing. OpenHiFi needs its DAC board designed! Plus several more projects! All and all it is exciting, but hectic.

I hope to have a few hours this weekend to put a few Cygni board together for anyone who has been waiting for them to come back in stock.

Once new revisions MSPism and BasicUART come in we hope to have a few more simple boards for the free friday give away line up but this week we are giving away another I2C sensor board. This is actually by request in some sense, as someone asked if it would be on sale. The answer to that is: nope but I am happy to give away all the extra PCBs!

It takes 3 sensors:

Pressure (BMP085)

Humidity (HIH-6130-021-001)

Light (APDS-9301-020)

Both humidity and pressure do temperature as well. Of course you don’t have to use/place all 3 sensors.

All of them are I2C based and share the bus. You will need 3, 2.2K 0603 resistors (all Rs are 2.2K), 2 603 0.1 uF caps (C1, C2), and a larger 603 cap (4.7+ uF recommended) C4. There is no C3 it was removed after annotation.

The board as per normal will be shipped free to a random commenter, leave a proper email if you want it!

FWIW comments remain moderated, be thankful for this, spam outnumbers real comment 2:1 at the moment.

Procyon Available (on sale)

Posted on by Brian

Procyon is our biggest board yet, now available for 72 USD with free worldwide shipping. You can buy one here. It has a massive 16 MB SDRAM, the ability to host USB devices (or be a USB device with an adapter such as this one), Ethernet to get connected over a network, and a microSD card slot for storing data non-volatility. You can execute code out of the SDRAM if you wish (though it is much slower that way). It is a great board for anything short of an OS. There is no MMU on Cortex M3 parts so a true Linux port is not possible (as far as we know), but uClinux could be ported if someone wants to try that or another RTOS such as FreeRTOS.

As is normal for our boards it comes with a header for a USB UART board for debug purposes or programming with the serial bootloader. We are currently out of BasicUARTs and BasicUART is being redesigned but many FTDI UARTs share the pinout.

JTAG programming is all around better and also allows for powerful debugging. That is included via the standard 20 Pin JTAG header. You can use something like Dangerous Prototypes’ Bus Blaster or an Olimex ARM JTAG.

The board is priced very competitively offering more memory and peripheral I/Os than most boards at its price point. From bare Olimex development boards to .NET to mBed, Procyon either costs less or has more features. The board works with our standard free GCC toolchain and has a number of examples to get you started. More StellarisWare examples (and there are lots of those for LM3S9B90) can be ported quickly to the board as well. What really makes our boards special is that our documentation is designed to help you use free tools, rather than expensive commercial offerings.

One project we have in mind using the I2S sound interface on Procyon is openHiFi. Another is an internet enabled home automation controller.

We have looked over the numbers as carefully as we can and hope we can sustainably offer it at a price of 72 dollars with free world wide shipping.  The issue with small batches is part cost actually changes batch to batch either due to overheads or just different sourcing. Putting boards together by hand as we currently do hides a lot of cost also as billing for that labor is hard to be exact about. Different boards require different amounts of rework. Pricing my labor (with a stop watch) or the cost of having 100s made by outside contract I hope this price will be both sustainable, while remaining affordable. It remains competitive to other boards, and combined with our comprehensive documentation we hope to grow a community of users around our now complete (as originally envisioned) Cortex M3 development board line up.

Love, hate or just comments in general are welcome. If we run out of stock please sound off in a comments or contact us to let us know you are interested in buying a board that is out of stock (so we can make enough in the next batch). Cygni and Eridani have had their price corrections and Cygni as I noted will be available for sale again soon.

Procyon Examples Published

Posted on by Brian

Procyon’s examples have been published. The examples contain one example for each major interface except I2S, as I don’t have a good audio board to check with at the moment. Part of writing examples is testing board functionality.

Each of the examples (other than basic and blinky) is used to check a function before the board is sealed for shipping.

In the current release (r1), the port of FatFS for the SD card example isn’t really complete, but it is functional. I will update it in the next example release for Procyon when I have more time. I will probably port the newest FatFS at that time as the version I used was from an old STM32 program I wrote and Chan has since improved it.

Procyon Documentation Release

Posted on by Brian

I just finished writing up the first revision of the documentation for Procyon today. There has been a lot of interested expressed in this one and I am pushing to get it out as soon as I can.  If you notice any typos in the documentation or just a sentence that doesn’t make sense to you please let me know. It can be hard to see mistakes in things you have just written because your mind already knows what it is suppose to say!

There were some questions at Maker Faire about CAD files. My policy on CAD files is I will release them if there is a lot of demand for them but at this time the overhead to get them into useable shape for someone else is high and I don’t know of any demand so it is a low priority. As I noted earilier, I plan to update the KiCAD tutorial and offer more advice on KiCAD use once KiCAD moves to the new icon set. At that time I hope to release KiCAD libraries and then after that start releasing board files for future designs. As time allows after that I will go back and clean up the old boards to work with the libraries I release online. That is my plan at this time anyway.

Stencils for Revision 2 of both Procyon and Cygni are now in hand so board manufacture is a lot quicker. Complete assembly and testing of a Procyon is however still time consuming simply because of how many pins and functions it has. I will post more on this later.

Procyon Ready for Production

Posted on by Brian

We are pleased to announce the Revision 2 of Procyon is free of PCB problems and is ready for production.

We backed off the front zone a few mils and had all of the boards e-tested. So far all the PCBs we have looked at seem okay. The functional corrections to the Ethernet jack fix the one technical error on the Revision 1 PCB.

We won’t have time to start production on these for another few weeks. They are relatively complex boards, as a result they take more time to put together than the other PCBs here.

The price for the first small run of these will be 65 dollars with free shipping. This is a bargain. The price may change after the first batch is sold.

If you would like one of the first Procyon boards please leave a comment or use the contact form. We will let you know when they are available.

Compare Procyon board with:

Olimex’s STM32F107 board: 69.00 at Mouser

Our board has the same Cortex M3 core running 8 MHz faster with more internal SRAM, and has 16 MB of SDRAM available, for 4 bucks less, plus free shipping. In addition our free documented toolchain has no code size restrictions and we offer more examples than Olimex for our boards.

Or compare to Ti’s Development board for LM3S9B90: EKI-LM3S9B90, 99.00 at Mouser

Our board doesn’t come with a JTAG , but does have an microSD card slot, and SDRAM something only available on the 425 dollar Ti development board. You can buy a Bus Blaster with the money you save if you don’t already have a JTAG. However you don’t need a JTAG to program Procyon as it will have the same bootloader as our other boards. Ti does have more example code than we do but the StellarisWare examples are easy to port to Procyon or any other LM3S series chip.

Or compare to Oilmex’s STM32-P103 at Sparkfun at 68.95:

USB Host/OTG not just device, SDRAM, more SRAM, faster, more flash memory, and Ethernet! For 3.95 less plus no shipping fee!

Or compare to FEZ Domino, more features (Ethernet, memory, etc)  for slight more money. Or FEZ Cobra far less expensive with basically the same feature set without expansion.

This list could go on quite a while. Our point is we think we are offering a very good value even with our very small production size. We hope you agree (feel free to tell us if you know of a more cost effective robust solution).

Again if you would like one of the first Procyon boards please leave a comment or use the contact form. We will let you know when they are available.