Getting started with PSoC Creator, how easy or how difficult is it?

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Anonymous
Not applicable

   

Members of the Cypress Developer’s Community

   
   

Your opinion is extremely important to Cypress. This is why we occasionally send surveys to you. We learn from what you tell us and, in the process, improve PSoC® Creator™.

   
   

Currently, our focus is how to improve your experience with PSoC Creator by making it simpler to get started with the program. We call it Ease of Learning.

   
   

Here is where your thoughts, opinions, and suggestions are important to Cypress. We ask for your input about how to:

   
        
  • Organize the data on the PSoC Creator website so that the information you need is easier to find
  •     
  • Improve our       Getting Started tutorial or other documents that helps you to quickly understand and use PSoC Creator
  •     
  • A list of relevant application notes that give you information about different ways to use PSoC Creator
  •    
   

This list is not complete. It does, however, give you an idea of some the ways in which we plan to improve PSoC Creator.

   
   

Thank you for your help, Robert

   
   

Thank you for helping us to make our software tools better for you, our customer.

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1 Solution
HuEl_264296
Level 5
Level 5
First like given 25 sign-ins First solution authored

My experience so far has been pretty positive.  As soon as I can (and when the parts are available) I want to move over to using PSoCs exclusively. Getting them going is actually a great pleasure, unlike PICs which are actually a total pain the the butt.

   

 

   

My only gripe is that the schematic interface could be improved a little. What I would love to see is:

   

Pain free zoom/pan. One way to do this is to allow zooming with the scroll wheel, with the zomo centered about the mouse cursor.

   

Ability to flip or rotate components while placing or draging them (rather than place, right click, go down to shape, across, down to rotate left). The way this is done in Altium is, while dragging, you can press space to rotate, and X and Y to flip the component horizontally or vertically.

   

 

   

Hugo

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3 Replies
HuEl_264296
Level 5
Level 5
First like given 25 sign-ins First solution authored

My experience so far has been pretty positive.  As soon as I can (and when the parts are available) I want to move over to using PSoCs exclusively. Getting them going is actually a great pleasure, unlike PICs which are actually a total pain the the butt.

   

 

   

My only gripe is that the schematic interface could be improved a little. What I would love to see is:

   

Pain free zoom/pan. One way to do this is to allow zooming with the scroll wheel, with the zomo centered about the mouse cursor.

   

Ability to flip or rotate components while placing or draging them (rather than place, right click, go down to shape, across, down to rotate left). The way this is done in Altium is, while dragging, you can press space to rotate, and X and Y to flip the component horizontally or vertically.

   

 

   

Hugo

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HeLi_263931
Level 8
Level 8
100 solutions authored 50 solutions authored 25 solutions authored

My first impression was "wow, now thats something great to work with" - and I'm still impressed with the ease of how to work with the PSoC eco system.

   

Like RocketMagnet, I also found the schematic designer somewhat difficult to use. When moving a component, the wires don't follow which makes relocating components a real hassle. Attaching wires to busses is also tedious - why isn't there a popup the moment the wire touches the bus?

   

I really liked the example projects, they were really helpful. But the more advanced ones sometimes lack information about why something is done, they just state "do it this way". In these cases someone really needs to dig into the documentation. Whats missing are advanced examples for working with the UDBs and the datapath (which is something I really could have used for my contest entry). Btw - is there any way of getting notified of new AppNotes?

   

I watched the training videos, and together with the "first 5 PSoC projects" found them also helpful (should have done this earlier, though :).

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Anonymous
Not applicable

It would be helpful if the question I am replying to were visible at the time of preparing a reply.  It's my out-of-sight, out-of-mind brain at issue.  I pasted the forum page into Word for visibility.

   
   

Last night I spent several hours in Creator Help, Documents, Blogs and Forum, each having a different search mechanism.  Please make sure that Google and other search engines can catalog all of your information sources.

   
   

> Organize the data on the PSoC Creator website so that the information you need is easier to find

   
   

A page for current status (known issues and workarounds, ongoing development, est. next release) of Creator and Components

   
   

Direct navigation to information about a specific component (or other subject) where links to all areas (help, docs, blogs, forum, app. notes) would be found all together in one list.  For example, I am wrestling with a UART problem and would want to focus on anything involving UART even if "UART" is not in the title.

   
   

> Improve our       Getting Started tutorial or other documents that helps you to quickly understand and use PSoC Creator

   
   

I used the FirstTouch Starter Kit Guide and am now seeing the above referenced document for the first time.  I think this should be included in the Starter Kit, as it says some things not present in the Starter Kit Guide.

   
   

> A list of relevant application notes that give you information about different ways to use PSoC Creator

   
   

Perhaps a table with app. notes for the rows and technology (component, etc.) for the columns, with an X in the cells to indicate which technologies are covered in a particular app. note.  A person may not be interested in an applicaion, but want to see "best practice" for use of particular technologies.

   
   

In general, I have found PSoC Creator easy to use for simple designs.  More challenging designs require careful research in documents and "reading between the lines" in some cases.  Help would be better if it stated why a particular thing would be used (non-obvious menu item for example). "Select Component Instance Debug Windows" is in Help, but I haven't found how to get there.

   
   

Component documents would be better if there were examples of how to use API functions.  Not every function, but the ones that are not obvious or would typically be used in conjuction with other functions.

   
   

UART document: RX timing diagram lacks rts_n; TX timing diagram is absent altogether; FIFO timing diagrams might be useful, especially with rts_n and cts_n in play.

   
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