Utilizing the abundance of powerful resources available to the RPiSoC is designed to be accessible to inexperienced users, but it does this without compromising the potential for complex projects. Making your own projects with the RPiSoC is simple through utilization of the PSoC Creator software.

PSoC Creator is a free GUI-based design environment for Windows that is able to remove users from some elements of embedded programming that might seem arbitrary or unimportant, like the many intricacies of an initialization routine. It simply requires the placement of “components” that serve as reconfigurable libraries. As soon as you drag-and-drop one of these components into your project, all of those tricky initializations are immediately handled internally. Once you’ve dropped one of these wonderful components into your schematic, all you have to do to start using them is call any one of their many useful API’s from your C-code, all of which are well documented in their respective component datasheets. Take a look at this example of a component datasheet so you know exactly what you’re in for. You can even create your own components or download community developed ones, including some that we’ve already developed specifically for the RPiSoC.

You can go ahead and download PSoC Creator from Cypress right now and experiment with it, even without the board. Make sure to take a look at all the components to see just how much you can do right out of the box. Examples include multiplexers, digital filters, ADC’s, DAC’s, PWM, logic gates, all your favorite communication interfaces like UART, SPI, I2C, and so much more!

You can program the board over USB using PSoC Creator. But if you prefer the convenience of a JTAG programmer,  you can also use the Cypress MiniProg3 for programming and debugging.