Seeing that this has become an award-winning blog, I feel I shouldn't let Chris bask in the glory all by himself. So here's my attempt at a first post that will hopefully propel me to stardom (everything starts with a dream, right?).
Over the holidays, while everyone was busy with Christmas trees and Santa Claus, I was looking through the E2E forums in our practically vacant office (for those who are wondering why I was there, it was because I had already used up all my spare change while vacationing in New Zealand the previous month. Great place to visit by the way!). It was a good opportunity to help out anyone who was desperate for help after realizing their Christmas present wasn't going to help them resolve their program crashes. Scrolling through the posts, I noticed that some of them seemed to have a recurring theme: users were trying to rebuild code involving SysLink using CCS, and seemed to be having problems. This is not at all surprising, given SysLink does not officially support rebuilding its samples using CCS. Short of an example, is it any wonder that users are having trouble?
The one comment that caught my attention was this one: "I've never been able to get CCS to build syslink compatible code that correctly runs." Is it really THAT hard, I thought to myself. There was only one way to find out - do it! So I took the messageQ sample in SysLink and rebuilt it in CCS v5.1 for the TI814x EVM, creating separate projects for the A8, DSP and M3. I had previous experience with CCS v3.3, but hadn't had a chance to build code using CCS v5.1. So the main challenges were to figure out the IDE environment and the build options necessary to rebuild the sample. In the end, I am happy to report that CCS was indeed able to build SysLink compatible code that correctly runs. Overall, I enjoyed working with the IDE, and saw the progress made since v3.3, especially in the area of project creation for both Linux and SysBios. I have since put up my CCS projects on GitHub for all to share. Here's a wiki article that gives more details in case you are interested:
http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Creating_CCS_Project_for_SysLink_samples
Enjoy, and have a good weekend!
