[re-printed from Cypress Developer Community - to learn more about PSoC 6 join the Cypress PSoC 6 EAP Community]
In Software Enablement for PSoC 6 – What to Expect I talked about what the Peripheral Driver Library (PDL) is. In PDL 3.0 – Designed for Flexibility I described the high-level design that supports multiple peripherals working on either core and operating on multiple data streams. You can use the PDL to take advantage of the power inherent in the PSoC 6 family, while simplifying software development.
There is an entirely different level of flexibility, and that's your choice of development tools. Until you get your hands on the PDL 3.0, this remains theoretical. But you’ll have some choices.
First, a tiny bit of background on the Cypress development tools. Then we’ll get back to PSoC 6.
Cypress provides PSoC Creator, an integrated design environment. If you aren’t familiar with PSoC Creator, let me describe it briefly. It enables the concurrent design of both the hardware system and the associated firmware. You drag components into a design, configure them and (when necessary) wire them together. You use a friendly UI to manage component configuration, pin assignments, system clocks, and interrupts. PSoC Creator is an expert system, and analyzes your design for conflicts or potential problems. Based on your design, PSoC Creator generates configuration and initialization code that you can use when writing the firmware. It supports iterative development – change the design, the generated code changes to match. PSoC Creator is free. It runs on the Windows OS.
PSoC Creator is a really good tool, and I thought that long before I joined the Cypress team. I have worked with code generators in one form or another for years, and I really like them. However, a fundamental principle that I subscribe to is, “your mileage may vary.” As much as I like PSoC Creator, you may not. We’re all about enablement, not about limits, and that includes your choice of IDE. This flexibility is designed into the PDL. We won’t make you change IDEs.
At a high level there are three paths you can take when you develop code using the PDL for PSoC 6.
Use it for the system design, and as a development environment for your software. It includes a compiler and linker, a programmer to download the executable to the platform, and a debugger. It has all the features you would expect to find in a good IDE, like code browsing.
There are a couple of ways to do this. For supported IDEs (IAR Embedded Workbench and Keil µVision tools are on the list), PSoC Creator has defined an export/import process for project files. For any IDE, even if not “officially” supported, you can add PSoC Creator generated source files to the project file in your preferred IDE.
While PSoC Creator can handle a lot of the system configuration for you (like clocks, setting up interrupts, and so forth), you absolutely can do this yourself. The PDL is, after all, a source code library. Just use the files you need. For example, the PDL includes code to manage the system and peripheral clocks. When PSoC Creator generates code to do this, it uses the PDL function API to get the work done. You can use the PDL source code directly, rather than the generated code.
When you use a third-party IDE from beginning to end, you lose access to only one PSoC feature. PSoC 6 devices have universal digital blocks (UDBs). A UDB contains programmable logic devices that enable you to build logic at the hardware level that links other hardware in your design, or to create a stand-alone block that performs a new function. If you want to develop a UDB, you must use PSoC Creator.
Of course, in the “real” world things can be a lot fuzzier. These three paths are real, but you can also find your personal sweet spot among these choices. For example perhaps you prefer to use snippets of code from the generated source files rather than complete files (a complex configuration structure perhaps). Or you like the PDL driver for one peripheral, but intend to create your own for another peripheral because of your unique requirements.
All of this is possible. The PDL is an enablement tool. You get all the source code. You can use it as you see fit.
Finally, you should be aware that choosing to use PSoC Creator components in your design presents some interesting benefits, and tradeoffs. I talk about that in a separate post, PSoC 6 Components and PDL Drivers.