Anyone using TMS470 (ARM) toolset?

Ouch. There are a bunch of nice ARM toolsets out there, I see no reason to be trapped into one that sucks.

Maybe you should start annotating your bills: so many hours problem solving, so many hours designing, so many hours wrestling with stupid tools...

Welcome to the club :-) (or the jungle?) If you just started with TI, you should be prepared to face in any field that they are involved industry-standard things (ARM, Linux, etc.) but done in unique "TI way". There is a lot of non-sense on many layers, which even TI field support in many cases fail to explain. But that's the reality, and their prices are good for most products (nonsense included).

I think that DSP/BIOS for ARM doesn't exist (at least I never heard about it existing for anything besides C3000/5000/6000 family). TI likes to focus on its core business and they see development of toolchains (like DSP C compiler) and OS (DSP/BIOS) as necessary evil. They introduced ARM-based DSPs for one of the main reasons the sake of taking advantage of Linux, GCC and other industry-standard tools and gradually phase out sales and support for own "side" software. However here the right hand doesn't know what the left hand does: in the mean time they have to support all the parts and provide interoperation between them; TI guys that do the work do it in their own way, and now we have what we have :-(

Just a month or so ago TI and CodeSourcery announced that CS would port GCC to C6000 to replace TI's toolset. A good beginning but there are yet "miles to go before" we get it, and if it will not be abandoned in the middle.

Sorry for long passage just to say at the end that we've got what we've got. There's a lot of "nonsense" in TI's infrastructure, but as long as there prices are good it's "take it or leave it" situation. If you absolutely can't get along with their tools then you may try some open-source support for their platform (my experience tells that in at least 95% of cases it will either not work at all or not do what is written on TI's product box) or switch to another vendor (not easy because TI's prices are tempting).

If you switch to something different and stick to TMS470 you will lose TI support.

The one is only reason is that if you later complain to TI or Spectrum Digital that something doesn't work and tell them you're not using the "authentic" tools they will tell you "we have no idea what you're talking about".

It won't work with TI. They are too big to care about any particular customer lost and they never claim that they do things in any way "sensible" to third-party judgement. OTOH their prices are usually too tempting to throw away their offer just because you can't fight stupid tools.

Daniel

There's a reason they named it "Code Composter". Too bad they misspelled the second word.

At the last MSP430 "event" I went to, the TI FAE openly discouraged anybody from using CC for the '430. The freebie demo kits they gave out contained an IAR demo toolchain. I did use CC for a TI DSP once, and though it basically worked, it wasn't nice.

AFAIK Code Composter is the only game in town for processors like the '2812. The compiler is OK, the debugger is far better than nothing*, but I've never used a captive IDE that I really liked.

• But then, any debugger is far better than nothing.

Which one? There are several (IAR, Rowley, Keil, gcc).

The TMS470 family doesn't have DSPs, so even if a DSP BIOS exists it isn't likely to do you much good.

IAR EWARM in particular is well supported by TI, much more so than the others I have tried. IAR offers a KickStart version; it has a 32K code limitation, but the price is right.

I used the IAR/Kickstart for a couple of MSP430 projects and found it to be a very good toolset/IDE.