Electrical Onboarding/PSoC getting started (Blink)

PSoC (Programmable System on Chip) is a powerful microcontroller platform that provides flexible hardware functionality in addition to the same software functionality you get with other micro controllers.

PSoC Microcontrollers

Most microntroller platforms (eg. Arduino, PIC) have fixed hardware peripherals the developer has access to, as well as a CPU that can execute software commands written in a language such as C. PSoC offers all of this plus reconfigurable hardware and interconnect fabric to allow almost any hardware device to be routed to almost any general purpose input/output (GPIO) pin on the device. Additionally, PSoC also offers analog component blocks such as digital to analog converters (DACs), analog to digital converters (ADCs), and amplifiers.

Setting up the project

Creating a new project in PSoC Creator

To begin working with PSoC, download PSoC Creator. This is an IDE that will allow you to create new PSoC projects and program your PSoC mircrocontroller. Create a new project by clicking File and selecting New Project. For this project we will assume you are using the PSoC 5 development boards used in the microcontrollers class (CY8CKIT-059), so select this as the target kit (see the image to the right). At the next dialog, select an Empty project, and click next. Then give your workspace and project a name (eg. Blink Workspace, Blink Project). A project is simply a design to be implemented on some PSoC hardware device, while a workspace is a container for multiple projects. For this example we will only have a single project within the workspace, but you could possibly have more (eg. a bootloader program and a bootloadable project).

Once your project is created you will be presented with a white box with a dotted grid. This is a blank schematic sheet where hardware peripherals can be added from the component catalog on the right hand of the screen. You will also see you workspace explorer where all workspace files can be found on the left hand of the screen. For this design the only hardware component that will be needed is a digital output pin. Add the pin component from the catalog folder Ports and Pins to your schematic and double click on the schematic component to configure it as shown in the figure below. Change the name of the pin component to LED_PIN to give it some contextual meaning in the project.

Blue shows the schematic component symbol, red shows the catalog entry, and orange shows the pin configuration settings.