Cypress drops PSoC5 Support from latest tools.
Recently Cypress Semiconductor released the long awaited version 3.0 of it’s PSoC Creator development tool suite.
This is an update I’ve been waiting for, it finally brings to Creator some features which other, older, IDEs have had for many years, including: Auto-complete; go to definition; a code explorer window; inline diagnostics; disabled code identification and automatic indenting. These are all things that every other IDE I use has had for 6+ Years, including Visual Studio, NetBeans and Eclipse.
So I was truly pleased when this update arrived, as it promised to be a great aide to productivity.
As it happens, however, it turns out to be one of the biggest disappointments from Cypress yet.
It turns out that Cypress has completely dropped support for one of it’s most popular and current chips, the PSoC 5. The PSoC 5 is gradually being replaced with a newer chip called the, er, PSoC 5LP, the differences between the two are minimal, and the new chip is a drop in replacement for the old one. The problem is that the old chip (PSoC 5) is still current. Cypress still sell it in quantities, all the major distributors still have many thousands of them in stock and ready to ship, and the last buy in date is January 2014 – meaning that Cypress will still happily sell you these chips, and will still sell into the distribution channel, until that date at least.
I for one have clients with many thousands of these chips on boards in currently shipping products, and I still have to maintain and support these products.
So I have no choice but to install the new tools side by side with the old, no longer supported tools so that I can develop new products in the new tools, and continue to support existing products using the old tools.
But get this -every time I open my existing projects in the old tools I get nag-nag-nag from the tools to update to the newer chips! That’s just not OK, I could understand if it happened, just once each time, when creating a new project, but it nags you like a petulent child every time you compile.
Come on Cypress, really, how hard would it have been to carry support for PSoC 5 through to creator 3.0?
By comparison, the latest IDEs from Microchip, and Atmel, (to name just 2) that I use, still target chips going back decades, some of which are no longer even produced anymore.
ICD 3 vs Mac OS X Mavericks Microchip’s MPLAB X Gets an update. V1.95 Now available.
GiffGaff
