MSP430FR2355: CCS Theia, really, how bad is this, major step backwards

Hi Tony,

First, I'm sorry to hear about your experience with CCSv20. At TI, we are committed to listening to our customers, addressing your concerns, and to continue to improve our software offering. If you can provide more details on the issues you encountered, it will help us greatly in trying to address them in upcoming releases.

To give some context on our move from the Eclipse IDE to Theia IDE for CCS, we made this decision to align with the industry trend of VS Code. By moving to the Theia IDE, we are able to offer a more modern look and feel IDE, while still being on an active Open Source IDE community that Theia offered (while the Eclipse IDE has mostly reach end of life, without much improvements on the roadmap). The Theia IDE platform also allows us to support a wider set of extensions to add to the IDE, including AI features that can help with development.

With that said, we do understand that CCS v12 and CCS v20 are quite different offerings, with certain features that users love using in v12 behaving differently in v20, or in some cases missing. We are actively listening to the community's feedback, and are trying to address these with each of our CCS v20 release. For example, the upcoming release at the end of this month (v20.1.1) will improve the usability of the Expression, Variable, and Disassembly view based on customer feedback.

On the support front, we have various documentation in place to guide users to the new CCS v20 experience, including User's Guide, Migration Guide, Getting Started Video, and Quick Tip videos. You can see the available offerings here: software-dl.ti.com/.../. Based on user feedback, we will also look into adding addition topics to our documentation to try to help users in those areas.

Hopefully you can provide your feedback to us as well, give us a chance to address these issues, and then give CCS another chance in the future.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thank you very much. 

Ricky

Hi Ricky

I just need to place this in context, we use multiple platforms and are often forced into using new ones to support our customers boards (we make test systems and devices). We normally can within a few hours be happy to write some "hello world" type program and run within a debug environment. We also write our own test scripting language and debugging tools for our products.

When we first used CCS quiet a few years back we had to fight to get the devicelib to work and lots of people where complaining about this and even the TI FAEs where unable to help. But once this was sorted, it provided an environment we could work successfully with.

That we struggled so badly with CSS V20 speaks volumes about how it works and we just had no luck making a plain boring vanilla project to enable us to write a basic program,  in the end we where forced to use the Blinky program as being the most basic code to start. Then we tried to use the debug environment, which should have been a case of a few presses of buttons... was just not... when we did eventually hack our way around the interface (and configurations that where expect to just be there) and run, no breakpoint or stepping function worked, it just sat there like a lemon.

I can offer you to show you where we are but "time is money" and we have already wasted enough, software tools should be going toward being more and more intuitive with the modern interfaces and power to assist... but this is really two steps if not more steps backwards. 10 days ago I was forced to makes some C# changes to some high level code in Visual Studio 2022... I have never touched both C# and VS before... within 1/2 day I was coding and debugging. It was initiative, if a bit overwhelming, but the basics was just there.

I really think TI have made a big mistake here and it will put people off your silicon, Microchip (dislike the CPUs as I do - personal preferences and all that) tool are just much better and just work without any significant complications.

Its a rant, we love TI and your devices are all over our boards but this is a stinker tool and I am not the only one that is saying this. We have V12 and it works good enough but we fear the future with TI and our beloved MSP430s CPUs.

Many Regards

 Tony

Tony,

Thank you very much for taking time to add details on the experience you went through with CCS v20.

One gap that we definitely have right now is the ability to create a empty/vanilla project. This is something we are looking into addressing in future releases.

The current Project Wizard is driven by the metadata from the SDK, so it provides various basic and advanced examples to start with, including the blink LED example that you started with.

To test out the debug experience on MSP430, I just tried the following steps in CCS v20.1.0:

1. Plug in my MSP430F2235 LaunchPad. The device is automatically detected in the Getting Starting interface within CCS.

2. This interface provides various quick links for the board, including "Create a new project"

3. Clicking on this will show the available projects for this board, including the Blink LED example

4. I created a project for this, which prompted me to download and install the required SDK

5. After the SDK install is completed, it prompted me again to import the project to the workspace

6. In the workspace, I can edit the code in the editor. After I'm done, I can right-click on the project, choose to 'Debug Project' (shortcut F5), which will build the project, start a debug session, and load the program. It will also switch to the Debug view.

7. In this view, I was able to set breakpoints and run the program. The LED on the device was also blinking correctly when the program was running.

This is the expected user flow when building and debugging projects in CCS v20.

I want to understand more how you got into the state where breakpoints and stepping functions were not working in your environment. If you can provide more information on the changes you made to your project, it might help us understand better. That being said, I understand if you do not want to spend more time debugging the issue. But I am available to help you and your team debug the issues or discuss how to improve our IDE if you are interested.

Thank you,

Ricky

Hi Ricky

As this is TI I am willing to spend time :-) (I am ex Technical Marketing of National Semi Germany before the take over) and I appreciate that you are taking our experience seriously.

We are using one of our own boards loaded with MSP430F2235 (in fact two but they are isolated from each other), we then ideally would have created a vanilla project but was forced down the blinky route (old farts (54) like me are definitely bare bones kind of guys, we don't like to be feed "hello world" programs and creating them is all part of the learning experience) but this is a personal thing.

Your debugging experience is certainly a million miles away from ours, I really hope it is not us being stupid but again we are quite experienced. 

Obviously we are not an evaluation board hence I assume these may give you some information that you would not get from our PCBA. We do have (many) evaluation board but I would have to find time to dig them out and try them (but that is not our goal to use evaluation boards)... we are using MSP-FET programmer connected directly to our PCBA. As with most MCU learning experiences we would have made our own blinky and then stepped through it and that in the Eden for most of our initial get up and goings with programming softwares like I expect 90%+ of other users.

Again impressive response to subdue my rant, don't get me wrong we are more than happy with the V12 setup and this is in daily use here, we just ventured down the V20 out of interest hence we are not on any time schedules here... but we are aware that time will likely force us down this route and we are very vested in MSP430. 

Many Regards

Tony

Tony,

I'm curious; on your board setup, is CCS able to automatically detect your MSP430FR2355 in the Getting Started page? The MSP430 detection code does a quick connection to the board via the MSPFET, and reads the device ID to do the detection. So even on a custom board, it might still work, but I don't have enough experience with this setup to know for sure. 

But even if it doesn't detect your board automatically, you can still manually choose your device via the dropdown and select MSP430FR2355 from it to get the same New Project prompts. And then, you should still be able to get a similar debug experience I got. 

As for v12, we actually do not have any intentions to force anyone from moving to v20, especially for customers using the MSP430 platform. If you are comfortable in v12, you can continue to use that environment (of course, we do encourage customers to try moving to v20, as we have put lot of effort in this release, and will be the IDE we continue to improve going forward). The only exception I can see is for supporting new OS versions; so if there are new version of Windows/Ubuntu/macOS, it will only be supported with CCS v20, as we are not actively developing on the v12 code anymore.

Another question; have your team looked at moving to MSPM0? This is the next generation MSP platform, and has many new development and features as compared to MSP430. Of course, if you do move to the MSPM0 family, CCS v20 is the recommended IDE.

Thank you again for taking time to reply.

Ricky