PSOC5 Compile & Debug Using Slight Of Drive Hand

I have a very old MacBook pro (3,1), core 2 duo, OS X El Capitan. The core 2 duo is one of the first 64 bit processors. I wanted to use it as a kick-around machine for debugging in the lab during high temperature testing.

Unfortunately, the current VSCode (1.6.3) will not install on El Capitan without crashing. An earlier version of VSCode (1.5) will, but that version will not run the extensions necessary.

I tried installing Ubuntu on the MBP, but that failed miserably. I think the hard drive also cratered at the same time. (Aside: I also have a core duo (32 bit) Ubuntu installed on a MBP 1,1 (2006), but VSCode requires a 64 bit machine. (ugh!)) I eventually found an old 128gb ssd and installed it in the MBP 3,1, and re-installed OS X El Capitan. Boots fairly quickly.

I had an old VMWare Fusion 8.5 (the last one that will run on the MBP’s OS without complaining) and installed it.

I was then able to transfer over LUbuntu 19 from Fusion 12 by downgrading the VM to where Fusion 8 will open it. That VM already had VSCode installed on it.

The problem that occurred was when the cyelftool.exe (which apparently requires a 32 bit wine to be installed) was not executed by wine 64 bit version. Fortunately, wine complained with a suggestion of what to do. I ran the command line the 64 bit wine app suggested, and I was able to get a build!

Bottom Line: A 15″ MacBook Pro from 2007 with 4 gigabytes of RAM will work with a Linux VM running VSCode as previously set up for Linux. (See my previous posts on this site.)

It takes about 45 seconds for VSCode to come alive and configure it’s extensions for working. (The VM is configured as 2 CPU’s with 3 gigabytes of memory.) Ram Bus speed is 800mhz, so is essentially a single 1 ghz processor, or two 400mhz processors.

After VSCode configures, it takes about 20 seconds for a small project to compile over a networked drive situated on my i9 iMac (using file sharing from that machine). The virtual machine is using a VMware shared folder located on the MBP. The shared folder is soft linked into an smb mounted volume. So, it ultimately reads the files from the iMac’s shared drive. Essentially an smb share of an smb share which also happens to be backed up by dropbox on the iMac. (Say that 5 times fast.)

I suspect the MacBook can be configured to do things a bit faster, but it is good enough for a machine that would otherwise be in the trash heap. Even so, it is still about twice as fast as a windows machine running PSOC Creator on a 3ghz processor in building the same project. Hmm.

Enjoy!