Free lunch

The Luas and Dublin

It's a view of Dublin from the footbridge outside the Red Cow hotel. The occasion - a free seminar on Cypress Bluetooth semiconductor products hosted by EBV. Not only a free lunch but also the freebies shown below including two hardware development kits (each worth $49). Although the seminar only scratched the surface it was a good introduction to these products and about the best kind of advertising a semiconductor house can engage in IMHO.

And the sun shining all day when I could have been mending the roof back at home...

Cypress freebies

For those of more technical bent, the main product was the "PSoC 4 BLE" chip that integrates a Bluetooth radio, touch-sensitive switch module, programmable general purpose analog and digital modules and a 48MHz ARM® Cortex™-M0 CPU. The development environment (also free) top level is schematic capture in which you drag and drop icons representing the various internal modules, configure them and then hit a key to automatically generate corresponding C-code which you can then optionally fine tune before compiling and programming the target device. Neat.