This is the first in a series of posts I plan to create as part of the Cypress CY8CKIT-058 PSoC 5LP Prototyping Kit RoadTest. I'll be documenting the things I tried and learned while using this kit, from a beginner's point of view.
Getting Started
The first thing to do, is to ensure the software required to use the kit is installed. There are two parts:
- PSoC Creator, the development environment for all things PSoC
- CY8CKIT-059 Kit files containing examples
There are two software related downloads. One containing both items mentioned above, bundled in a single installer, and the other containing only the kit specific files, should PSoC Creator already be installed. Good to know, is that the software only runs on Windows.
Once PSoC Creator has been installed or updated with the kit specific files, the examples should be listed on the Start page. To access the examples, expand the view of the kit and double-click the desired example.
The kit comes pre-programmed with the "Blinking LED" example. A full explanation of how this example is created and how it works is explained here: How to Blink an LED Using a PWM Component with PSoC 5LP
If like me, you are not running Windows natively, you can still easily use the PSoC kit with a virtual Windows environment. I've described this before, using the PSoC 4 Prototyping Kit, but the procedure remains the same. The small guide can be found here: PSoC 4 Prototyping Kit on OSX (or Linux) with VirtualBox. Once the kit has been added to the list of USB devices, it should be detected by Windows and be ready to use.
Breathing LED
To familiarise myself with the kit and with the development environment, I started modifying the "Blinking LED" program and tried a few things:
- accelerate the blinking (PWM clock frequency)
- invert the functionality: push button to blink, release to stop (remove NOT gate)
- different on/off periods for the LED (PWM duty cycle)
Testing these things also confirmed that my virtual environment is functional and can reprogram the kit successfully.
Once I felt more comfortable, I took the example program modifications a step further.
By duplicating the PWM component, modifying its period to be slightly different than the first one and combining both signals with a XOR gate, a PWM signal with variable duty cycle is created. Attaching digital outputs at certain key points, it is possible to measure the output using an oscilloscope.
This is the output, with the signals being:
- Yellow: output of the XOR gate
- Cyan: output of PWM signal #1
- Magenta: output of PWM signal #2
The animated signals with the LED next to it looks like this:
Et voila, breathing LED! More adventures using this kit will be posted soon!