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Configuration Tools and Wizards for CCS would help improve user experience and productivity

Nereus Fernandes
Prodigy 110 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: HALCOGEN, AM5728

A large portion of work on CCS ( especially for the simplest of projects ) involves configuration of the various registers in the DSP to use the functionality that comes built-in with the hardware.

Even the simplest of configuration requires reading through pages and pages of the documentation. The class structure does help and does provide guidance on the use of the various fields.

It would be nice to provide wizards that would help in adding and configuring peripherals. The wizards should be invoked from the toolbar and should be able to parse the code and provide a user-friendly form dialog that prompts the user to configure the cpu, peripheral fields and also provides the option to auto-generate the basic functions, ISRs with outline code.

Also the watch-windows display the data in hex format. It would help if clicking the registers could bring up a dialog with the various fields with English names and values.

My request is to make the development environment a little more user friendly so that the customer can concentrate on solving his/her problem and not spending a lot of time learning the software or searching through the manuals for the right configuration needed.

  • TI__Guru**** 171309 points

    Hi,

    Thanks for taking the time to provide your suggestions. One of our goals is to reduce the learning curve of the IDE environment and the suggestions are certainly towards this goal.

    Regarding peripheral configuration, for selected MSP430 devices there is a graphical peripheral configuration tool called Grace that allows performing low-level configuration from a very high-level perspective, but I am unsure how its supported device list is evolving these days - the experts at the MSP forum would know better. For other device families there is no such tool integrated into CCS (Hercules devices have a standalone tool called HalCoGen). A request for such tool would have to start from the device group directly.

    Regarding the detailed register views, the main issue is always performance and memory usage - CCS has to parse all this information before launching a debug session, and each piece of information requires memory storage (heap) to be accessible by the user.

    Despite this, the level of detail is absolutely arbitrary provided the device groups take the time and effort to implement this (the CCS team does not have control over this information). That said, some devices have a pretty good level of detail in the register descriptions: an example for the AM5728 device is:

    Is the Register view above what you meant by Watch window in your original post? Or did I miss the point?

    Thanks and regards,

    Rafael 

  • in reply to desouza
    Prodigy 110 points

    Thanks Rafael. Yes that is what I meant for  displaying the contents of the various fields in registers in an easy to read format.

    I also found that some devices like the 28069 have wrapper classes for the peripherals that can be added to the watch window and

    do provide the register field data in easy to read format -- even this is sufficient. It took me some time to understand and use this

    feature hence my earlier complaint :-)

    All the same I still wish for the Wizards the would help during code writing for configuring the peripherals. They should read the

    existing classes and display information in a user friendly dialog. They could run a compilation and generate the dialog only if the existing class code

    is consistent and error free. Additionally they could help the user in creating and configuring new peripheral classes with auto-code

    generation of  the new classes.

    Anyway with the tight development budgets we all have, maybe these will not be possible. Or perhaps someone could develop them as an open-source

    add-on to CCS.

    Other options for auto-code generation like VisSim and the CCS-Matlab extension are expensive and I have not investigated them fully.

  • in reply to Nereus Fernandes
    TI__Guru**** 171309 points

    Nereus,

    Nereus Fernandes said:
    All the same I still wish for the Wizards the would help during code writing for configuring the peripherals.

    I agree with you that would be a very nice feature to have. It would be an involving task given the number of different peripherals and devices, but nonetheless very useful. I will forward this thread to some of the device teams and see if they have any additional comments.

    It just occurred to me we have another tool that, despite not comprehensive as your original request, may help you with the configuration. Have you ever heard about the Pinmux?

    http://www.ti.com/tool/pinmuxtool 

    The desktop version does not support C2000 devices, but the online tool has support for a few of them.

    Cheers,

    Rafael