What is in this article?:
- PSoC Development Software
- PSoC Creator
- PSoC Designer
Cypress Semiconductor delivers provides a number of software development tools for its PSoC line of processors. These tools tend to a be a little more sophisticated than conventional IDEs because of the configurability of the PSoC peripheral hardware. The tools take this support into account providing developers with the ability to select and configure this hardware. In this article I provide a hand-ons tour of two of the tools: PSoC Creator and PSoC Designer.
These tools work with and come with most of Cypress Semiconductor's hardware development kits. The software was actually tested using the $49 PSoC FirstTouch Starter Kits for the PSoC-3 (CY8CKIT-003) and the PSoC 5 (CY8CKIT-014) as well as the $249 PSoC Development Kit (CY8CKIT-001). The operation of the software was identical for all of these platforms so I don't make a distinction between them.
PSoC Creator is a rapid prototyping environment that can be utilized by developers may not embedded development experience. It takes advantage of the configurability of the PSoC hardware to deliver a wide range of predefined, configurable devices that can be wired together using the graphical development environment thereby creating an application that is ready to be deployed and tested on a PSoC platform.
PSoC Designer is a more conventional IDE that brings a graphical, schematic design environment for hardware configuration as well as a software development tool for assembler and C/C++ application development. Developers can use one or both aspects of the tool depending upon their design requirements. The hardware and software sides work together so the interface details for a selected hardware configuration incorporate the respective header definitions for the software.
