MSP430: Trouble Halting Target CPU: Could not terminate EEM polling thread.

Hi Seb,

can you please expand on what you are experiencing?   Hopefully there is a fairly simple solution.

When does it work and when not?  Specific projects?  After using the FET in another tool/computer?  When a certain program/hardware etc is also plugged in?  

When it does not work, what do you experience?  Error messages?  Any error logs?

Which MSP(s) do you use?  Do you IAR or other tools installed?

Best Regards,
Lisa

Hello,

from my expirience untill now, I would say it is a random process, that is not corellated to any other device atached or software i use.

As I said, sometimes I cannot access my MSP430 at first place and when i klick retry it works, sometimes i am loosing it when already in debugging mode and stepping through my program.

I am using MSP430F5437A, MSP430F2274 right now and i have updated to CCS 4.2.5 and my MSP UIF430FEt debugger was firmware updated after this automatically.

I have the IAR Workbench installed, but as my Code exceeds the 4 kB free version i cannot use it.

Right now it is working most of the times, and by that I mean sometimes it cannot write the *.out file, but when I try repeatidly it will work after the next couple of tries.

So it is frustrating from times to times, but untill now I dont really have  a choice so I will work with it.

Perhaps more users have same expiriences, or even TI is aware of some buggy behaviour.

THanks for your support.

Best wishes.

Seb

Hi Seb,

I am sorry to hear you are experiencing such instability. 

I can only suggest perhaps removing IAR if you can not use it anyhow or renaming msp430.dll in the IAR directories.

I would also keep an eye on further MSP updates and patches going forward.  Unfortunately the new v3 dll has had a couple bugs we are working hard behind the scenes to fix for future CCSv5 releases.

Best Regards and all the best with development.

Lisa

I'm experiencing the same problem.   CCS works great, then starts showing "MSP430: Trouble Halting Target CPU: Could not terminate EEM polling thread.",

The situation is in developing software for the MSP430F5438.   Several days of good productivity, then I can barely load code with out an issue.

I've rebooted my windows7 pc several times, that seems to help, but after a few edit-compile-debug spins I'm facing the inability to halt the target without seeing the error.

Not sure what to do to debug CCS (I'd rather debug my own program right now).    Rebooting the PC seems a bit painful.

Any other suggestions?  I'm using CCS Version: 4.2.4.00033 and I'd rather not update to CCS v5 as that might derail my project unless this is a known problem and there is a known fix for the emulator.

My emulator is a TI USB FET and this is a 'clean' laptop, no other MSP installations.

Any guidance on procedures to workaround the problem would be much appreciated.

Thom

Hi Thorn,

is this also a non-reproducable intermittent thing?  It is extremely hard to debug such things.

I wondering if something is inflating or corrupting your workspace or java memory.    Have you tried a fresh workspace?  Have you tried the smaller update to 4.2.5?

Have you tried renaming ctools.dll?

Best Regards,

Lisa

I have found that if I 'disconnect target', power cycle the target board, then 'reconnect target' that seems to help so I'm making progress at the moment.    I am only using CCS to edit, compile and load code - not using breakpoints or debugger features in order to avoid the emulator problems.   I'm at a pllace in the project where I can get by using 'printf debug' thru the serial port, though it would have been great to debug an ISR with breakpoints as that would have saved quite a bit of crafty serial port debug.

I have not tried a fresh workspace.  I do have a number of projects under my existing workspace that are in occassional maintenance mode.  Are you suggesting that I copy the source files from my present project (under schedule to deliver pressure) to a different directory then create a new workspace?   If so, I'll give that a try when I've got a chance.

My laptop has 8GB of RAM and I'm running only internet explorer and Teraterm (2 instances) so I'm not sure what would chew the java memory. 

I'll give a shot at renaming ctools.dll to ctools.dontloadthisdll later today, if that fixes the problem I'll post the result.

As for updating to 4.2.5,  I'm running for the finish line to deliver a product (next week or two) so I'd likely do this after delivery unless you can point me to a particular known bug fix for the problem I'm having.

In case you are interested, a feature request for CCS would be a 'check the health of the emulator' feature.   I've used other IDE's that have some form of this, let me know if you want suggestions.

Thanks for the ideas on fixing the problem,

Thom

Hi Thom,

no worries.  Keep us informed.

Best Regards,
Lisa