CCS6.1 Takes too long to program F2837xD. Please help.

Hi Peter,

I agree the onboard XDS100v2 emulator is slow and nothing can be done. What you can do is purchase XDS560 which is pretty expensive and you need to purchase CCS license to work with it. Now with XDS100v2 CCS comes free for C2000 devices. And.....
Which Atmel part number are you comparing here?

Regards,
Gautam

Hi Gautam, long time no speak. :) WOW your right, it is expensive. TI, Why so expensive? If you want us developers to use your chips in our

products then why make it so expensive. Maybe I should go back to ATMEL instead and use their chips for our world wide product.

Doesn't TI know that when we mass produce our product then they will make there money back. It make me so angry when manufacturers sell there

programmers for big bucks and then you have to purchase a license to use it and that's big bucks too. Can you remind me why we are using TI chips for our world wide product?

Anyway (calming down now). Yes the USB emulator is free so I shouldn't wine about how slow it is, that's what your saying right?

ALSO the ATEML part number we also use is the Xmega256D3 and Xmega128A1U 8 bit chips running at 32Mhz. Programming using Studio 6.1.

Would you believe these chips only need 2 wires to program them.

Anyway if there's nothing I can do to speed up the download process on the F2837xD I'll have to rethink about using TI chips for our product. I'm wasting more time waiting for the code to download to the chip than working on our product.

TI says buy this product and buy that programmer so you spend less time and money to market. YEAH RIGHT !

Pete (Not Happy at the moment)

 

Hey Pete,

No need to be angry... btw I don't work for TI :)

I'm the same community member as you're... but helping out others.

Peter Adamcik said:

Hi Gautam, long time no speak. :)

Haha.... this means you've been solving your queries very well thus keeping yourself away from E2E :)

Peter Adamcik said:

WOW your right, it is expensive. TI, Why so expensive? If you want us developers to use your chips in our

products then why make it so expensive.

XDS100 is specially for developers with low budget. Then comes XDS200, XDS510 & XDS560. I know XDS560 is expensive but there are lot of people using the same to get the maximum speed.  

Peter Adamcik said:

Maybe I should go back to ATMEL instead and use their chips for our world wide product.

If that helps you realize your application better and with ease then why not! For my applications C2000 devices are perfect and I can't imagine any other mcu taking its place soon.

Peter Adamcik said:

Doesn't TI know that when we mass produce our product then they will make there money back. It make me so angry when manufacturers sell there

programmers for big bucks and then you have to purchase a license to use it and that's big bucks too. Can you remind me why we are using TI chips for our world wide product?

You have lot of options for emulator as I've mentioned earlier. For C2000 its all free... right from license to on-board emulator. XDS100v2 emulator if bought separately is also very pocket friendly
.

Peter Adamcik said:

Anyway (calming down now). Yes the USB emulator is free so I shouldn't wine about how slow it is, that's what your saying right?

Yup Pete :)

Peter Adamcik said:

ALSO the ATEML part number we also use is the Xmega256D3 and Xmega128A1U 8 bit chips running at 32Mhz. Programming using Studio 6.1.

Would you believe these chips only need 2 wires to program them.

Yup, I've worked with majority of manufacturer's chips and esp. Atmel's ATMEGA, TINY & XMega chips. Personally I was not happy with XMega's performance as it does not have a 32-bit mcu in its kit.

Peter Adamcik said:

Anyway if there's nothing I can do to speed up the download process on the F2837xD I'll have to rethink about using TI chips for our product. I'm wasting more time waiting for the code to download to the chip than working on our product.

First of all, F28377D is a super speed mcu (@200MHz) and you can't compare it with XMEGA devices. Why don't you try TMS320F28027 based Launchpad which runs at 60MHz ?

It programs very quickly! Do give it a try.

Regards,

Gautam

Thanks Gautam, I'll check out the specs on the TMS320F28027 based Launchpad which runs at 60MHz.

Pete :)

Sure... do ping if any doubts!

Goodluck & Regards,
Gautam

Like Gautem mentioned the XDS100 is our entry level (cheap) one. It is built to be as cheap as possible so that the cost of starting development with TI is low. Same concept with our LaunchPads, for a minimal cost you get a development board with an on-board debug probe and a dev tool license.

XDS560v2 is ideal for our high performance processors and has a built in system trace receiver. For C2000 I would look at going with an XDS200 once you get further along in development. The XDS560v2 would be overkill.

John

Pete,

I think the long program times in this case may be related to some default settings of the integrated flash programmer(erase all flash on every program load) that is in the background when you reload your recompiled program.

Under the "Tools" menu click on On-Chip Flash; which will bring up the below window:

Specifically I believe you want to un check "erase entire flash" setting and only erase what is need for successful flash programming.  Or you can do this by sector if you prefer.

Also in this menu is the ability to only download the RAM contents, such that if you know the flash hasn't changed there is no need to update.  Finally there are some verification options that if not used may also speed up things.  Given the size of the flash on this device, I think the full erase everytime you are re-loading is the culprit though.

Please let me know if this is indeed causing your issue,

Best regards,

Matthew

JohnS said:

Like Gautem mentioned the XDS100 is our entry level (cheap) one. It is built to be as cheap as possible so that the cost of starting development with TI is low. Same concept with our LaunchPads, for a minimal cost you get a development board with an on-board debug probe and a dev tool license.

XDS560v2 is ideal for our high performance processors and has a built in system trace receiver. For C2000 I would look at going with an XDS200 once you get further along in development. The XDS560v2 would be overkill.

John

John, is this some kind of joke? We purchased the F2837xD control board and the docking station. Downloaded CCS 6.1 expecting to use the full 1MB Flash but now just finding out we are only limited to 16k. WHAT THE ! 

Now your saying we have to purchase the XDS200 kit to continue with the TI chips. Does this come with a FULL LICENSE? The cost of the XDS200 at Digi-key is $463.69. Suddenly the cost has risen dramatically. Ti says buy this, buy that to reduced cost and time to market. WHICH PART OF REDUCE COST AM I MISSING? I see it as adding cost and time to our world wide product. Why do I feel as if we are getting ripped off by TI? Makes me so bloody angry.

Let me get this right, we have to pay for your dev kits, licenses to use the bloody things to it's full potential. Then we create our world wide product using your chips and then we do a mass production. TI make hundreds of thousands of dollars from our mass production and yet we have to pay for stupid licensing to make TI thousands of dollars from our world wide product. I'm so pissed off right now !

Where the hell is the support from TI, tell me?  Look after your customers with a FREE FULL VER of CCS so we can reduce cost and time to market. 

ATMEL'S Studio 6.1 is FREE and the FULL VERSION as well. Why can't TI do the bloody same??????

I'm going to rethink if our world wide product really needs TI's chips. You guys are just wasting our time and money.

Forward this message to TI's CEO.

Peter

CEO / Lead electronics design engineer.

Move Systems Australia

  

Pete,

Regarding Flash Plugin: Things that you can try to improve Flash Plugin performance are
1) Uncheck “Backup/Restore clock register settings during Flash operations”
2) Uncheck “Perform Blank Check before loading data to Flash memory”
3) Uncheck “Verify Flash after Program”
4) Check “Combine Sections during Program Load to increase performance”
5) Select “Necessary Sectors Only (for Program Load)” under “Erase Settings”
6) In the linker command file, make sure that the sections are aligned on 64-bit boundary (You should see “ALIGN(4)” for the sections that are mapped to Flash).

But XDS100 is a slow emulator as others mentioned.

Thanks and regards,
Vamsi

Vamsi Gudivada said:

Pete,

Regarding Flash Plugin: Things that you can try to improve Flash Plugin performance are
1) Uncheck “Backup/Restore clock register settings during Flash operations”
2) Uncheck “Perform Blank Check before loading data to Flash memory”
3) Uncheck “Verify Flash after Program”
4) Check “Combine Sections during Program Load to increase performance”
5) Select “Necessary Sectors Only (for Program Load)” under “Erase Settings”
6) In the linker command file, make sure that the sections are aligned on 64-bit boundary (You should see “ALIGN(4)” for the sections that are mapped to Flash).

But XDS100 is a slow emulator as others mentioned.

Thanks and regards,
Vamsi

Thank you Vamsi, I'll update the settings and see how she runs.

We may be moving over to ATMEL chips, just waiting on a reply from John.

Pete

So the discussions are getting hot in here :)
Pete follow Vamsi's steps... this will save quite an amount of time while flashing.
Also, according to me F28377D would be an over kill for your project (judging wrt XMega that you plan to use).

Regards,
Gautam

Pete,

I really hope my reply doesn't determine whether or not you go with TI or Atmel. You mentioned a 16KB limit in your post. For C2000 none of our CCS licenses have a code size limit. For the free CCS license the limitation is on the type of debug interface. With the free license you are restricted to an XDS1xx class debug interface (like what is on the LaunchPads and other starter kits). You are correct that to use an XDS200 you would need to have a full CCS license which does add to the cost of getting your tool environment setup. I sent you a friend request which has some info in it that hopefully can help with that.

XDS100 probes for use with your own custom boards cost ~$79US (some partners have cheaper versions available). In a lot of scenarios the XDS100 is good enough. Hopefully after updating the settings suggested by Vamsi you find the performance to be acceptable.

Regards,
John