Problem starting with the C2000

Hi Luis,

First of all, welcome to the C2000 forum!

Luis Afonso said:

1st problem is, i still haven't seen a big advantage over a ARM-M4/M3.

For me personally, I never felt like i was missing anything with C2000 devices sometimes yes, it lacks user interface libraries. Other than  this, these devices have high resolution peripherals like HRPWM, HRCAP etc... that you'll be unable to find elsewhere. Also, there are ready made power libraries like 2P2Z, sine gen, motor libraries etc. You will understand when you start working with these devices and implement the actual power electronics :)

Yes, these devices take sometime to become your "pet" but all you've be is a little patient.

Luis Afonso said:

Second problem is, in the controlsuite, when i chose the launchpad device and go see code examples and i press the "View all 35 examples", nothing apears. It says it's not possible to chose page.

I hope you've downloaded the latest controlsuite from the website. You should not face this issue, also you can directly navigate to

C:\ti\controlSUITE\development_kits\C2000_LaunchPad\f2802x_examples

for all the example codes.

Regards,

Gautam

Hi Gautam,

Thank you very much! 

Well, i never felt like i had a shortage of precision with the Tiva.

I still don't gotten into many professional applications, just what some projects ask for and contests so maybe that is why. Of course i do those to learn but i want to be able to create real world applications.

User interfaces... well, as long as it is documented how to use the registers i am good, C programming with direct register access is a pain but doable if there is documentation and examples.

I hear allot universities using the C2000 in the automation specialization. That's why i want to get a bit into it.

I see myself more using the C2000 as a slave MCU with a Tiva (like a motor control board with a tiva central brain), i hope a delfino launchpad is released, other boards are to expensive compared to a launchpad.

I'm still not sold :p i have to go look more into it

Gautam Iyer said:

I hope you've downloaded the latest controlsuite from the website. You should not face this issue, also you can directly navigate to

I did. That's weird. i will try to download it again and also check the examples directly. 

Luis Afonso said:

I see myself more using the C2000 as a slave MCU with a Tiva (like a motor control board with a tiva central brain), i hope a delfino launchpad is released, other boards are to expensive compared to a launchpad.

For me its the opposite, as C2000 is poor in diplay and user interface drivers; I use it as a Master device and MSP430/TIVA/PIC/ATMEL devices as my slave. C2000 does all the complex computations and then send the data to the slave device. I'll not be able to achieve the same if I use a ARM M3/M4 device alone as my computations have control loops that have to be updated after specific time and this specific time is in microsecs (ie an uninterrupted CPU timer). During this computation I should not evoke any other peripheral. As you might already know, calling a display write routine or serial routine or eeprom write routine takes lot of cpu time which would make my loop go imbalanced and thus making my system unstable. Hence I use a slave device like above to take care of touch interface or 20x4 display with button interface or graphic display interface that will also take care of data logging in an EEPROM. I hope you're somewhat clear :)

This is exactly why TI launched Concerto family in C2000 list where we've C28x DSP core + ARM M3 core.

Regards,

Gautam

Hum that point of view truly changes what i was thinking.

I been searching and the C2000 MCU in the launchpad seems to be one of the lowest end.

Looking more into other MCUs (and also the launchpad one more in detail) it actually it even seems a better candidate for one of the contest i am using to learn, micro mouse. It seems to be able to do allot of the calculations needed to solve a labyrinth while keeping the robot on track with the sensors and motors, maybe.

It's seems settled. I will try to learn more about the C2000 over the ARM-R4 hercules :p

Thank you very much.

That's great that you atleast got an idea for  "WHY C2000?"  :)

Luis Afonso said:

I been searching and the C2000 MCU in the launchpad seems to be one of the lowest end.

Exactly, check F28377D which is a C2000 mcu with dual C28x cores and is the most powerful C2000 device.

Regards,

Gautam

Gautam Iyer said:

Exactly, check F28377D which is a C2000 mcu with dual C28x cores and is the most powerful C2000 device

The brochure has a really ambitious statement in that it can make the job of a FPGA in controlling motors. And that MCU truly beats any ARM-M4 :0. Although there's a M7 now 

 The price of the development kit is really high compared to what i usually get to my hands on.

Luis Afonso said:

The brochure has a really ambitious statement in that it can make the job of a FPGA in controlling motors. And that MCU truly beats any ARM-M4 :0. Although there's a M7 now 

Can you point me towards this brochure?

Luis Afonso said:

 The price of the development kit is really high compared to what i usually get to my hands on.

Yup, its on the higher side.

Regards,

Gautam

Gautam Iyer said:

Can you point me towards this brochure?

Well it's probably just a small FPGA; but still

http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/sprt687a/sprt687a.pdf

i still can't see the examples in the control suite, only directly searching them in the folders. But only in some MCUs. The delfino work fine. 

It's weird Can you please test if in your control suite the same happens for the c2000 launchpad device?

Luis Afonso said:

i still can't see the examples in the control suite, only directly searching them in the folders. But only in some MCUs. The delfino work fine. 

There's a small bug in the latest update of controlSuite. The directory addresses seem to be faulty and have to be modified which would be done soon. I've updated the same to C2000 team.

Here's an example: http://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/c2000/f/171/p/379816/1337583.aspx#1337583

Regards,

Gautam