22.12.2015 16:59

Texas Instrument Notes

I do not like TI that much - their product portfolio is not easy to understand. Their website is all over again asking me to confirm various legal notices, export regulation and another lawyers goodies. Their CCS based on Eclipse is slow, debugging has often some glitches.  Now the last thing that happens is that after a few years customer asked to make a modification to a project. I have the development environment archived, but the hell happens again.

Mainly due to TI debugger. Official TI debuggers for MSP430 family are quite expensive. At the time this project was developed MSP-FET430UIF was the "one". Today you can not by it from distributors like RS components of Farnell (they say it is not produced anymore). It could be bought from TI.. maybe. Anyway I took the one from the shelve, that was used in the meantime for other projects and found that its firmware was updated and is incompatible with old CCS v.4. The firmware in the debugger is updated quiet often. Mainly due to new products, which is annoying as I do not change the product during the project. Nevertheless, the debugger can not be downgraded from old environment as it does not see the debugger at all. TI changed the USB VCP class of the device to USB CDC class.

First I tried to download a new MSP430-FET driver from TI pages as debugger was not detected in the old environment anymore. During the install I ended up with installation finished, but something was wrong

Error running 
C:\ti\fetdrivers\emulation\drivers\msp430\DPInst\DPinst.exe /q /se /sa 
/path "C:\ti\fetdrivers\emulation\drivers\msp430\USB_FET_XP_32" 
: Program ended with an error exit code
Executing C:\ti\fetdrivers\emulation\drivers\msp430\DPInst\DPinst.exe /q /se /sa /path "C:\ti\fetdrivers\emulation\drivers\msp430\USB_CDC"
Script exit code: 256

Script output:
 
Script stderr:
 Program ended with an error exit code

Very helpfull. After few manual attempts it magically installed without /q parameter.

Glad I found the page MSPDS Debugger Up- and Downgrade

To downgrade the FW I have to use a new version of IDE. My way out was to download IAR 6.40 for MSP430 with updatetool.exe that is able to downgrade the MSP430.dllv3 to MSP430.dllv2. But you know this means downloading 470MB of installation, installing the software, registering on IAR for at least free or eval license, running the updatetool manually and of course it ended up wrong. The new VCP was not detected by updatetool and the update was not finished. After another hot moments I found Linux at least enumerates the device, I blindly run the old CCS and it detected the debugger and "updated" the FW to the newer (pretty old) version of FW.

So this is TI. Afternoon lost with FW in the debugger.


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