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Hello,

I am an EE graduate student.  I'm interested in avionics and robotics. I wanted to try out a high end microcontroller after playing with Arduino/AVR and Cortex-M3 so I picked up the TMS570 USB eval stick. I am not very familiar with CCS at all so please put these comments in the context of a newbie.

• Fast shipping from TI eStore.  I love that. 
• The kit is packaged pretty slick.  Not something an engineer should get too excited about, but I liked it.
• Software install was pretty straight forward.  I tried the demos and they worked right out of the box.  However...
  • Why are there so many external tools/components to install?  CCS must be a nightmare to install/maintain in a corporate environment. 
  • Why do I have to disable Windows UAC? I realize there is a ton of stuff going on under the hood when you support such a wide variety of processors with one IDE but if I had bought the full license I would expect a more tightly integrated, Windows 7 friendly development package.
  • Again, the install proceeded without any issues so that was good, I'm just saying the piecemeal nature of all these tools is intimidating and seems complicated.
• I opened up CCS from the Launcher thingy and built the provided demo project. Compiled with no errors...nice!
  • What no other sample projects? No Hello World walkthrough?
  • I understand that all the CPU details are pretty well laid out in the TMS570 Reference Manual, but as a student who is trying to develop skills in the embedded & controls world, it would be very helpful to have some more basic examples that illustrate how to configure a project from scratch.  It looks like you have some good examples for the MCP430 and C2000 stuff but nothing for Cortex-M3 or R4F.  My guess is this kit is targeted at professionals who have a bit more experience than me, but it would sure help to lower the barrier to entry. 
• Why is there no schematic of the stick included or available for download?  I realize it is mostly just the XDS100v2 emulation stuff, but it would still be nice to understand what pins are connected to what without guessing.  If I want to build a custom prototype board it would be nice to have some sort of reference design to look at.

In general, I think the TMS570 USB is a great value and has sufficient source code & documentation included to get started developing for Cortex-R4F.

Thanks

My name is Shah Sheybani, and I am support engineer, trying to use your TMDX570LS20USB with our automated testing tool.

I have to say that the ordering and shipment of the kit was fantastic.

I had CCS4.1 installed on my PC to test the simulator before receiving the kit.  Which made the Kit CD installation very difficult. The Norton ant virus also flagged one of the startup.exe as positional dangerous program, and had to be disabled.

Now that I am setup  with the CCS4 and TMDX570LS20USB.  however I have a major issue with the download speed. 

It is taking little more than 5min to download the included demo code, ~282Kbyte, using the CCS4.   Is this normal? 

Shah,

  Thank you for providing feedback on the TMS570 USB Stick Kit (TMDX570LS20USB).  The USB Stick has a low cost XDS100v2 JTAG emulator on the board to provide debug and flash programming/erase access. However; even with the low cost XDS100v2 emulator, the 5 min demo code download (flash erase/programming) time with CCSv4.1 seems excessive.  By default CCSv4.1 will erase the entire 2MB of flash memory of TMS570 microcontroller even if it is not necessary.  You may change this configuration in CCSv4.x to speed up the process by doing the following:

1) While in the CCS 'Debug Perspective' bring up the On-Chip Flash settings by using the 'Tools -> On-Chip Flash' pull down menu.
2) In the On-Chip Flash tab (shown in the picture below) choose the 'Necessary Sectors Only (for Program Load)' option in the 'Erase Options' section.

As you progress in your development with the TMS570 you may want to look into using a higher performance JTAG emulator.  This will greatly enhance the debug and flash erase/programming experience.  Please see this TMS570 WIKI page for more information on JTAG emulators:

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/JTAG_Emulator_Options_for_TMS570LS