CY3209-ExpressEVK Kit Review
| Category: Electronics By on 2008-05-28 | Digg it! |
I acquired this CY3209-ExpressEVK Kit from a friend who's company uses Cypress to develop their software. I'd have to say I was really impressed with the ease of the software and the ability for me to easily program it without knowing much or what the hell I was doing. I was expecting to have to dig through a bunch of C code trying to figure out what each line was doing and then after understanding it, try to figure out how to use it for what I wanted.
This board was programmed using their software PSoC Express 3 and the PSoC Programmer. The main program being PSoC Express 3, which creates the Hex file that the programmer just simply loads onto the board using their PSoC Mini Prog USB Key into whichever part of the board you want to code.
The board is divided into 4 sections but each can interlink using the software provided. Every section contains a small microprocessor, 6 LEDs, a push button, an analog knob and finally 6 pins, 4 to program the section of the board. The board can be powered either with pins directly, a 9 volt battery or simply the USB.
Anyway, back to the programming part, the kit provides labs you can do, although I only did 3 of them since the other ones I wasn't interested in or did not have the other parts to do.
The labs can be found on the above link under the Manual or here. The software is also available there.
Programming basically consists of picking up components and dropping them then making "transfer functions" that relate two components to each other. For example relating the state of a pushbutton to the state of an LED. Really easy stuff.
However there is not much you can do with this board besides their silly labs, so if you want to learn how to use their software go for it, but I wouldn't pay for this and get a real PicKit from Microchip like this one.
PicKit1
Cheers
