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ModusToolbox 2.0 - Even Vice Presidents Can Use It

ModusToolbox 2.0 - Even Vice Presidents Can Use It

markgsaunders
Employee
Employee
50 sign-ins 10 solutions authored 5 solutions authored

Oh my stars, it has been a week since we released ModusToolbox 2.0! I thought I'd be getting some down time after the release but, as usual, things did not really go that way. Instead of taking a break we decided to give all the San Jose vice presidents a crash course in all things ModusToolbox. This was a group of sales guys, marketeers, and business unit managers, with not a single engineer among them... what could possibly go wrong?

Alan Hawse (who else!) was hosting the day but he missed his plane from Kentucky. We had no course materials. The kits we wanted to use for lab sessions arrived two days late. And, worst of all, we found that all VPs share one common skill - the ability to mess up software installations. It was a hectic day but, by the end of it all, these guys...

ModusToolbox training SJ.jpeg

... got our motley collection of non-programmers writing programs using every customer development flow that we could think of...

  • Mbed CLI
  • Mbed Online Compiler
  • Mbed Studio
  • ModusToolbox IDE
  • Visual Studio Code
  • And from the command-line

And we were not just building blinky. When you get a group of VPs at your mercy... it would be wrong not to torture them with a little C and C++ programming ("I wrote Pascal in college and waaa waaa waaa"). So we had them writing to TFT displays, connecting to Wi-Fi networks, polling NTP servers, and pulling all that together to create a PSoC-based alarm clock. In one day.

I think this is a testament to the design goal of ModusToolbox. We wanted to create a set of tools and libraries that are so flexible and interchangeable that we can support bare metal or RTOS-based applications; running in our own ecosystems or partner platforms like Mbed and Amazon FreeRTOS; using our IDE, a partner IDE, or no IDE at all; and building with the compiler of your choice. I think we crushed that objective, so 'Chapeau' to all the 226 engineers that have worked on the project!

Another good thing to come from that crazy day was that I now have a good set of starter projects and use cases that I can blog about and get everyone excited and up to speed with the new tools. Watch this space...

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