Anyone working on connected products is undoubtedly looking for hardware with good built-in connectivity features, and low-power never hurts if your project has to be small, mobile and run off of batteries. Cypress’s PSoC 4 BLE might be a good option for these types of projects in addition to a new kit they showed at Embedded World.

The recently launched Programmable System-on-Chip (PSoC) 4 BLE from Cypress integrates onboard Bluetooth Low Energy radio for designers to make sensor-based, low-power wireless systems. It also includes integrated programmable analog front ends (AFEs), programmable digital peripherals, and a CapSense (capacitive touch) user interfaces in an ARM Cortex-M0 single-chip package.

The Bluetooth Low Energy Pioneer Kit (CY9CKIT-042-BLE) enables Bluetooth Low Energy application development with the PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC BLE devices. PSoC Creator provides example projects for Bluetooth Low Energy mixed-signal embedded designs. Power measurement jumpers and a coin cell battery and holder allow for low power evaluation. It’s compatible with Arduino Shields and has a host of software included for development.

At Embedded World Cypress showcased the PSoC 4 M-Series and related CY8CKIT-044 PSoC 4 M-Series Pioneer Kit, launching in March.

The new PSoC 4 M-Series expands the PSoC 4 family to include 16 programmable digital blocks 12 programmable analog blocks, 128 KB flash memory, a direct memory access controller, dual CAN interfaces, and 55 general purpose I/Os with the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 core.

To help optimize power consumption for many applications, there are five low-power modes to choose from. It has a low-leakage retention power mode that uses 150 nA while retaining SRAM, programmable logic, and it can wake up from an interrupt. It also has a non-retention stop mode down to 20 nA with GPIO wakeup capability.

The CY8CKIT-044 PSoC 4 M-Series Pioneer Kit includes the CY8CKIT-044 PSoC 4 M-Series Pioneer board, a quick start guide, USB Standard A to Mini-B cable, and four 4″ jumper wires and two 5″ proximity sensor wires. It has onboard sensors including an ambient light sensor, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a temperature sensor. It has headers for Arduino Shields and Raspberry Pi in addition to Diligent Pmods, which enables users to use third party modules. Software includes the PSoC Programmer, and PSoC Creator IDE for concurrent hardware and application firmware design of PSoC 3, PSoC 4, and PSoC 5LP systems.