Alas, there was one fatal flaw that could deal a harsh setback to the OPP project. What could it be you may ask? It is simply that the PSOC 4200 developer boards that OPP requires stop being manufactured. As you probably know, OPP uses the CY8CKIT-049-42xx development board as the main processor. Cypress, without notification, seems to have discontinued manufacturing the development board. Let’s look at this quick link from Cypress that was updated on 6/26/2019, yet fails to mention that the boards are not going to be produced anymore. Mouser lists the board as obsolete. There are a couple available on Ebay, a couple available on AliExpress, but as of this moment, I can not find a “supplier”, i.e. a person that could sell ten of these on demand.
The most annoying part of this is that I was not notified by Mouser, Cypress, or the different distributor channels. I get a few emails every year saying that this part has been changed, this part has a last time buy, etc. There were absolutely no notifications received about the developer board going obsolete. (It might be because Mouser only notes obsolescence with individual chips, and not developer boards, falsely assuming that projects are not using the whole developer board as part of a larger build.)
So first things first. What if somebody gets caught out without having the PSOC cards that they need to create their dream pinball machine? At this point I have six CY8CKIT-049-42xx in the stock room (i.e. my basement). Contact me if you need a board and I will get it to you until my supplies run out.
Going forward, that won’t work, so what is next. Somebody pointed out that I should look at the STM32F103 development boards that came out a couple years ago. After a little bit of research, it seems that the boards are already being produced in China, and the Arduino code base has been ported by a few people. Arduino only really matters to me because I feel it will guarantee that the board will be produced for a longer period of time. I don’t want to be caught in the lurch again trying to move all of the firmware to yet another processor. (That would be the third because OPP originally started on HCS08 based processors, then moved to PSOC 4200, and now it looks to move to STM32 based processor).
A quick look at the pinout of the stm32f103c8t6 board (hellishly known as the “blue pill”, don’t search on that), it seems that I can come up with a way to support the wing boards without any modifications. There at least seventeen inputs/outputs on the left side, and fifteen inputs/outputs on the right side so I may need to describe moving a wire for an input from the left side to the right side. (That is unless I can figure out a way to make the NRST a generic input/output pin which may be impossible).
There are some good points to the new processor. The stm32f103 supports a USB virtual com port. That will significantly increase the bandwidth for communications to the board. It should remove the need to daisy chain boards, and a simple USB hub should suffice to talk to multiple cards. While that increases wiring between the main processor and the individual controlling cards, it will make communication much simpler. The processor itself is much faster, and has much more memory. The USB stack will eat up a good portion of that extra memory, but on the balance, there should be plenty leftover for pinball. Last change is that the outputs are only 3.3V as opposed to 5V. Shouldn’t be a problem for solenoid control since the threshold voltage of all the MOSFETs are well below that level. Switch matrices should work properly, but that would be what concerns me the most.
Two weeks ago, I bought a couple of the STM32F103 boards, and installed all the tools to start programming the boards. I got three boards, and the ST-LINK V2 programmer for $11.49 from a guy out of Ohio. It was a buck or two more than from AliExpress, but got here in about a week as opposed to a month or two. The STM32F103 boards go for about $1.70 on AliExpress which is significantly less than the $4 price that the CY8CKIT-049-42xx used to be. As I progress and move the OPP code over to the STM32F103, I will post updates.
Open Pinball Project 