New! ModusToolbox™ 2.3 Available for Download

markgsaunders · ‎Mar 29, 2021

I am excited to let you all know that we just released ModusToolbox™ 2.3 and it is available for download on all three host operating systems. The new software adds support for new devices and a diverse collection of improvements to the overall user experience. We also made a couple of necessary changes to how we handle GitHub libraries that are mostly interesting to existing users who want to update existing projects to use the new tools.

New Devices

PMG1™ (Power Delivery Microcontroller Gen1) is a family of high-voltage microcontrollers with USB-C power delivery (PD). PMG1 is a great fit for any embedded system that provides/consumes power to/from a high-voltage USB-C PD port and leverages the microcontroller to provide additional control capability. The devices are backed by three prototyping kit BSPs (PMG1-CY7110/1/2), which demonstrate USB PD 3.0 protocol-compliant PD Sink capability up to 100 W (20V, 5A) and our new EZ-PD™ Configurator for easy setup.

Setting the PD role in EZ-PD Configurator

Back in January we announced early access support for the XMC1400 and XMC4700 Industrial Microcontrollers. I am proud to say that the software is now production-ready with two kit BSPs (XMC1400 BOOT Kit and XMC4700 RELAX kit) providing a great out of box experience. Check this community board for announcements of new kits, new XMC devices, and labor-saving configurator features coming later in the year.

User Experience

Improving your experience with the tools is becoming a bit of an obsession for us. Here's a list of what we've done in this release. Please let us know in the community if you have any difficulties or, better (of course), good ideas for further improvements.

Selection of a 3rd-party IDE is now possible directly from the Project Creator menu, without the need to run a "make <ide>" command

Selecting a target IDE

To help you spot problems, the Project Creator and Library Manager tools now output color-coded error, warning and success messages
Multi-User Windows Installation allows all users of a computer to use ModusToolbox™ (see the installation guide for more details)
Updating Eclipse for ModusToolbox™ to version 4.17 allows us to offer support for macOS Big Sur
The Quick Panel in Eclipse for ModusToolbox™ has been optimized to speed up switching between projects
The Project Creator tool can now be launched directly from Modus Shell (cygwin) by simply typing "project-creator"
A new command, "make update_bsp", changes the target MCU part number to prevent mistakes and speed up BSP development
Our desktop icons are now using official Infineon colors - we love them!

GitHub Changes

We made two significant changes to our handling of GitHub libraries. Firstly, we are starting to migrate content from cypresssemiconductorco to the github.com/infineon account. That sounds scary but, actually, you should barely notice anything because GitHub does an automatic re-direct to the new account on any request (clone, push, pull, etc.) for that repo. We have thoroughly tested all the tools and Modus Shell commands so your flow should not be impacted, even as we publish new versions migrated libraries. The only time where you may need to be aware of the change is when accessing a never-before released BSP, software library, or Code Example from the command line – and the only change is that you will need to use the new address (e.g. “git clone https://www.github.com/infineon/mtb-example-psoc6-brand-new-example”).

The second change involves version control for libraries. You may have seen that the tools typically pull in the latest versions of libraries when creating projects. We do this by requesting the latest GitHub tag in the .mtb files using the convention “latest-v1.X”, which tells the tools to pull the newest “release-v1.X” copy of the repo. Note that we deliberately avoid newer major releases, (say “release-v2.0”) because, by our convention, major releases do not guarantee backward compatibility. This has worked fine when creating projects but had a flaw when using the Library Manager to add or update content. The latest tag would pull in new library versions for ALL libraries, even if only one was explicitly changed. To avoid making silent changes to your projects the tools now swap the latest tag for the appropriate release tag when you create the project or add a library. This means you always start with the latest and greatest but you stay with those versions until you decide to change them. If you prefer to work the old way you can set the versions of your libraries to latest in the Library Manager

Telling Library Manager to always update to the latest version of a library

Temporary Removal of Power Estimator (CyPE)

One piece of bad news is that we had to remove the CyPE tool from the distribution. We were not confident that it was usable with customer (i.e. your) hardware and are just not comfortable shipping a demo, as opposed to a usable tool. We have resolved to improve the tool and make it less reliant on the specific board in a future release. If you are using the Power Estimator today, and wish to continue, you can still use version 1.20 from the ModusToolbox 2.2 release.

Resources

We hope you like the sound of the changes we have made in this release. Please download and install it right away - it only takes a few minutes - because we are confident you'll enjoy it and it will help you make some great new products.