Project Introduction

The idea is to build a smart home hub that focuses on energy saving. The two main functions would be controlling the AC and/or opening a window in a way to minimize energy consumption, and switching off lights in the room when they are not needed.

In summary:

- Indoors and outdoors temperature sensing

- Control of existing AC systems based on temperature data and user preference

- Control of existing lighting fixtures

- Human presence detection

- Reduction of energy consumption using the features listed above

- Home security system using the same sensors used by presence detection

- Web UI to control smart home from any device

PSoC Development Kit - Getting Started

The board arrived in a really nice box, containing the development board itself, a micro USB cable, and a few jumper cables.

Setting up the ModusToolbox IDE wasn't the most pleasant experience, the Cypress website really didn't want me to download it. Even after verifying my email address several times, I still couldn't download the installer because it thought my email wasn't verified. After logging in and out a few times, it finally let me download the IDE.The setup was mostly fine, except for the part where an environment variable has to be set manually. While the installer shows exactly what this variable needs to be named, and what it has to contain, but why can't it do it automatically?

Once installed, the IDE opens, and a new project can be created.

First step is to choose the Board Support Package

There are a LOT of built in example projects, which was a pleasant surprise.

I chose the Hello World example, which blinks the User LED and writes/reads from UART.
Once the project was created, a detailed README was shown, which guides first time users nicely through the basics.
It also warned that it might be necessary to update the firmware for the onboard programmer.

The development board shipped with a recent enough firmware, however I decided to update it anyways.
After downloading the latest Firmware-loader from GitHub, I ran the `fw-update` executable and listed the connected devices.

After seeing that the board was recognized, the firmware was updated by running "fw-loader.exe --update-kp3 all"

Then, the board can be programmed with the Hello World example

Overall, the ModusToolbox IDE looks promising, the included example projects are very welcome, however the installation experience could be improved a lot.