Low Power IoT Design Challenge - Getting Started

7 Sep 2021

I just received my Challenge Kit (PSoC 6S2 + AIROC Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Pioneer Kit) via UPS yesterday (9/2) - thanks danzima . I commented to my wife that the box seemed a bit heavy for a small dev-board. I was pleasantly surprised to find extra goodies that Infineon had provided . Thanks Infineon for the lab notebook, pen and Hydro Flask insulated bottle.

I've decided to create this intro post "on the fly", so I probably won't publish it for a few days. I'd like to be able to get the toolchain installed and a few examples working first.

Toolchain Installation

Application development for the PSoC 62S2 kit is supported currently by the ModusToolbox and Mbed OS tool environments. This challenge requires that we use the ModusToobox, so I'll start by downloading the latest available version (2.3 plus 2.31 patch). The Windows Installer made the install easy, but took quite a few minutes and installed about 3GB of files.

ModusToolbox runs with either a graphical user interface (GUI) or a command-line interface (CLI). To get started I am going to use the Eclipse-based IDE (GUI).

mtw - Eclipse IDE for ModusToolbox

The IDE has a "Quick Panel" that provides easy access to frequently used tools to create, build and run application programs.

The Project Creator tool is invoked by selecting "New Application" in the Quick Panel. Project Creator uses a Board Support Package (BSP) to generate all the necessary configuration files for the IDE. It makes it extremely easy to switch between different boards for different projects. In this case I selected the CY8CKIT-062S2-43012.

Once the BSP is selected, you have access to an Application Directory that contains sample applications that are available for that board configuration. Selecting a sample application will create a project with all the required files for that project (source code, makefile, dependent libraries, etc). If you build an application from scratch, there is a Library Manager that will allow you to add required libraries. As usual, to test the installation and the tool pipeline, a good place to start is the "Hello World" project.

Hello World is the standard "blink the LED" demo. In this case you can pause the blinking over the serial link. Here is a quick demo with the board superimposed on the putty serial window, so you can see the serial response and the LED reaction..

E-Ink Display Shield

I'll get into the description of my project in the next post, but one item that I definitely wanted to include was a display. There are two Arduino format display shields available for this board. The CY8CKIT-028-TFT board has a 2.4" Color TFT 320x240 display. The CY8CKIT-028-EPD E-INK board has a 2.7" Monochrome E-Paper 264x176 display. Both shields also have single PDM microphones and a motion sensor. Since this is a "low power" challenge, I opted for the E-INK shield.

Modus Toolbox has an emWin E-Ink FreeRTOS application example that I used to check out the board.