TMS570LC4357: need to confirm basic HDK operation

Hello Joseph,

There should be no issues related to the emulators as you have speculated. The TMS570LC4357HDK has an XDS100v2 emulator built into the board so all you need to do is plug it into a USB port on your PC.

All of our publicly available documentation is located on the part specific product page. If you notice, whenever you make a post and include the part number TMS570LC4357 it becomes a hyperlink. This link will take you to the product page where you will find the TRM, Safety Manual, Errata Document, Datasheet, application notes, HW modeling tools, foot print/fanout design files, and other documents.

In regard to the TMDX570LC43HDK, you can find information for this on the HDK's part number specific (TMDX570LC43HDK) product page as well. This will include design files and a user guide.

In regard to the safety demos, I am not certain which you are trying to run. If it is the GUI based demo that comes with the kit, it is sometimes problematic because of the NI/Labview runtime environment used to create the demo GUI. In general, the application that runs on the MCU is just a serial based command and response protocol that causes the associated action to take place. You might be able to modify the code and simply call the functions directly with using the GUI to initiate them. Nonetheless, if you want to use the SafeTI Demo, I would suggest making certain that you have the latest one which can be downloaded here: www.ti.com/.../hercules_safety_mcu_demos. Once the latest one is installed, if you could post the specific issue that you are seeing or error messages you are getting, we could try to help you work through the issues. I would also recommend that you check the version of the Halcogen tool as well. Halcogen can be downloaded directly from this link:www.ti.com/.../halcogen

For help getting started there is an application note that covers the steps to create a project using Halcogen, importing it into CCS, and executing the code. This application note can be found at this link: www.ti.com/.../spna121b.pdf

The files located in the example directory are only the source files to carryout the example. These examples require that you configure the drivers in a specific way. The directions for doing so are located in the help section/embedded user manual of the Halcogen tool. i.e., Click Help-->Help Topics-->Examples. Clicking through these menus will get you to a list of the examples with the same names as the source int he examples directory. Selecting one of these will bring up step by step examples on how to generate the code with Halcogen. Once you have the Halcogen project code generated, you can follow the steps in the getting started application note to import into CCS and begin compiling, downloading to the HDK, and executing/debugging the project.

In regard to setting up and using the board on a CAN network. This device has 3 DCAN modules on it. The DCAN module supports standard CAN and not CAN FD. However, if you would like to accomodate a CAN FD network using this device, TI has a new device,TCAN4550-Q1, that has 2 CAN FD channels that can be added to your design. The TCAN45xx device sends the received CAN FD messages to the host MCU/Processor via SPI using a SPI Clock up to 20MHz. The maximum CANFD buad rate supported by the TCAN chip is 5Mbps.

To address your question about the support for this device, it is very much still active and will continue to be supported over a very long term. The Hercules line of MCUs do not use the resource explorer capability at this time since this was not the targeted channel of content delivery for our product line; although, I do understand the convenience of using it. Perhaps in the not to distant future we will be able to enable our content in this way. If there are other tools or feature that you come across that you cannot find this device as supported, please feel free to ask. This will help us enrich our content and let us know what types of tools are needed/desired.

Something to consider: Create just one mailbox for RX and another mailbox for TX. It involves code beyond what HalCoGen creates, but it is possible to do..