Hello fellow PSoC enthousiasts!
As die-hard PSoC user, I think it's good to create a wishlist / future vision for the next-gen PSoC IDE. I see a lot of users individually looking for the best IDE for PSoC development.
I think Infineon/Cypress did a good job by developing ModusToolbox and making a lot of tools cross-platform. I also see a lot of users having trouble with ModusToolbox (including myself) and missing the ability to use PSoC Creator on different platforms. Luckily MTB provides a good route to develop on other platforms as well and the good thing is that users don't have to use the MTB Eclipse IDE environment by having the ability to use the provided tools within other environment.
For a good reason, PSoC Creator is still by far the winner for developing applications (even on PSoC6!):
I hope this is a good wake-up call for Infineon/Cypress to closely watch what's happening and notice that PSoC Creator should still have more focus (4 revisions MTB vs 1 PSoC Creator in the last two years). With that in respect and knowing that the UDBs inside PSoC are gold, the next step would be to develop Creator UDB Components for PSoC6. It's very hard to believe there's not even room for a minor amount of man-hours to roll-out UDB components for PSoC6. Moreover, the UDB fabric for PSoC6 is the same as for PSoC5 and it shouldn't be too hard to adapt the PSoC5 components and library for PSoC6. I migrated 3 UDB components which took me 1-2 hours per component.
The development of the cross-platforms tools are really helpful in case someone wants to work on a non-windows machine or with ones favorite IDE. As a long term PSoC Creator user I really enjoy the smoothness of it and love the design editor. For a project I was forced to work with MTB (debugging M4 with a locked M0p) and I never got a good grip on MTB. Personally, I missed the intuitiveness (I was never an Eclipse fan) and the smoothness. This led me to setting up a Visual Studio Code environment which costed me a lot of work. Finally, I regained the smoothness and intuitiveness with the VS Code setup and by now I prefer it above PSoC Creator. Especially the editor is much faster and I really like the debugging smoothness and 'hovering over' quickwatch functionality within VS Code. This is the very first template I created for setting up VS Code to use with PSoC6: GitHub - onethinx/PSoC6VScodeTemplate (let me know if you want to work with it, I currently have a lot op updates).
I was viewing this topic by DaEr_349131 which could be a good start for the next-gen tool:
- Make it more git friendly.
- Make it possible to script or import items to the schematic editor
- Offer a standard netlist export for the schematic created in Creator
- A headless compiler that can be run command-line on Linux & Mac
With the MTB tools and a custom IDE setup, the GIT and compiler feature requests are already covered (Git is covered with most IDEs currently and there are several compilers available which runs on Linux & Mac for PSoC6). What really is missing is 2 and 3, the schematic editor functionality (especially for non-Windows platforms). I found people having some attempts to find a possible alternative for PSoC Creator's schematic editor, ranging in finding out the UDB's FPGA bitstream in order to use it on other tools or using Forth to program the UDB's. Here are some interesting links:
gelFORTH | Hackaday.io
https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/~h~openfpga/2017-12-08
GitHub - cyrozap/psoc-bitstream-parsing-tools: Parse the programmable logic configuration of PSoC de...
Cypress PSoC · azonenberg/openfpga Wiki · GitHub
I am sure Cypress/Infineon is able to help, and/or provide solutions in order to work with their utterly briliant UDB logic!
-Rolf
