You only get one chance to make a first impression. Therefore, it is important that the customer experience is pleasant and polished from the moment a customer first opens the box of an evaluation kit to when they finalize their application. Many sales have been lost in the semiconductor industry by poor first impressions on customer experience. The competition is fierce and it is easy for engineers and system designers to switch devices during the evaluation stage. That’s why with the LaunchPad ecosystem, Texas Instruments provides Project Zero tutorials, out-of-box demos and sample code to make sure you are able to set up the hardware before making deeper evaluations of the MCU. The strength of the LaunchPad evaluation kit is the ability to leverage the self-help resources and community support to get started with minimum hassle.
The web experience is the first key to a smooth first impression. Is it easy to find and download the development environment and software drivers? Are there sample code examples and reference designs? Is it quick and painless to browse documentation, datasheets and application notes on devices and kits? Having these resources available and easy to find is a big part of customer success and TI is working constantly to improve our best-in-class web experience.
Packaging and quick start guide information included with a kit may not make or break a design decision, but it certainly can enhance the speed to a decision. Having good information out-of-the-box in a well presented package is extremely helpful when working with new hardware.
While an excellent out-of-box demo can make for a pleasant and potentially exciting start to the development cycle, the key concern is getting started smoothly with the development tools. A poor experience with the tools can easily discourage a decision to use a part. With LaunchPad, there are multiple points of entry with a wide variety of options for customers to develop application firmware in popular ways. For a complete Eclipse-based IDE, TI offers Code Composer Studio, which includes TI Resource Explorer that contains sample code and documentation for TI embedded processors. For rapid prototyping, Energia is an intuitive and lightweight code editor that is perfect for quickly evaluating an embedded system designed around LaunchPad. There is also support for IAR embedded workbench, architecture specific development environments and command line tools. Project Zero tutorials guide you through how to set up these development environments with your hardware so that you can more quickly get to your end application.
TI strives to make sure that as a LaunchPad customer and beyond, you are getting access to resources you need to build next level designs. Check out the Project Zero tutorials and get a solid start with TI MCUs!
