CyDuino : An Arduino Dev Board with Lots of Goodies

We (most of us) really like Arduino because it’s possible to make cheap clones, lots of libraries, examples, forum support and community out there.

Outside Arduino world, I like Cypress PSoC for some of its cool features like Graphical IDE, APIs, great features and understandable documentation.

I have bunch of PSoC® 4 CY8CKIT-049 4xxx Prototyping Kits.

The first half of this kit has CY7C65211 device, which is by default a programmable USB-UART serial bridge. I was thinking, maybe I can turn this part into a Arduino Porgrammer.

Bingo ! It worked, with a little bit of hack and a Uno Bootloader Atmega328P.

Arduino i.e. Atmegaxxx with Arduino Bootloader requires Rx, Tx data lines and DTR control line for uploading sketch.

Here is a pinmap of CY7C65211 chip –

We need following pins to be connected to Atmega328p for making a CyDuino –

But, unfortunately the DTR pin has no breakout to the edges.

Here is where I made a hardware hack. Scratch and remove the silkscreen and bring out a connection for DTR.

The Goodies

Here is an image of the finished project –