Is there a request for CCS on MAC OSx?

Hi

A MAC OS  port of CCS4 would be very welcome from my side. Go for it TI Guys.

Andreas von Känel

I'm in a similar situation, I need to run Windows XP as a VMWare virtual machine to run CC4, since the front end of CC is Eclipse and has been already ported to OSX I would strongly agree with the notion of porting a full version to Mac.  The further I can get away from Windows and the more apps (specially one like CC4 that I use all the time), the happier I'll be.

BTW, I found this post when I was searching to find out if it had already been done...

I assume that the biggest task would be "drivers" for the Emulation adaptors.  Fortunately, the USB JTAG Emulators should be a cinch, because Mac OS X does not require a literal driver to access a Custom Class USB Device.  Either libusb or some custom C code to access the OSX USB API would be all that's needed, and the rest of Eclipse should run on the JVM.

By the way, I would seriously appreciate CCS on Mac.  I am already designing for Texas Instruments DSP using Eagle on Mac, so if I could develop firmware on Mac as well, then I would not need to keep finding Windows XP licenses.

I would definitely be happy to see Code Composer for Mac. After switching over to a Mac I'm never going back to Windows. Unfortunately I'm forced to because most electrical engineering apps are designed for Windows. A Code Composer for Mac would really make my life happier.

Also, I recently discovered that you can program ATMEL MCU's on a Mac via Xcode which is a huge advantage. So if I'm to further develop on TI MCU's I would almost go as far as saying it is necessary to get a Code Composer for Mac, or at least a plug-in to Xcode would be even better.

// Steve

That's another good suggestion.  Xcode fits into the same place in the tool chain as Eclipse.  Both treat the compiler as an external executable, and both also treat the debugger as an external.

The question becomes whether Xcode has sufficiently defined the interface for debuggers, such that a Texas Instruments JTAG Emulator could be used for debugging purposes.  At least for me that would be necessary.

As for the compiler, Texas Instruments could easily compile a Unix/Linux version of of their various compilers, and Xcode should be able to call them with a few minimal project settings.  Xcode is really just a file manager and Makefile front end.

I have no idea whether it would be easier to get Eclipse or Xcode working as an IDE for Texas Instruments processors, but I would be happy to see progress on either front.

Hi Guys,

I don't know if some of you struggled over this post regarding TUSB3410 drivers for MAC OS X: http://e2e.ti.com/support/interface/digital_interface/f/130/t/55982.aspx.

Since TI's MSP430 tools were using this chip it souldn't be such an issue to get them up'n running on OS X. The Stellaris tools (when using an evaluation board as JTAG Emulator) were based on FDTI USB-to-Serial chips with FTDI already supporting OS X --> so no problem here too!.

I'm sorry, but I can't say anything about OMAP and/or DSP device regarding their JTAG tools.

Rgds
aBUGSworstnightmare

I am feeling the same!

It will also be cool to have a CCS for other unix/linux system like ubuntu.

Hope that TI will consider user's wishes!

Thanks,

Alfred

Alfred Zhong said:

It will also be cool to have a CCS for other unix/linux system like ubuntu.

CCSv5 will run on Linux. It is tested on Ubuntu 10.04.

Beta versions (supporting limited number of devices/emulators) available now:

http://e2e.ti.com/support/development_tools/code_composer_studio/f/81/t/61266.aspx

Thanks

ki

I'm running OSX, with Windows XP in a Parallels VM for MSP430 development. I'm currently using IAR, but would switch in a femtosecond to CCS if it was available on OSX. I'm already using eclipse in OSX for other development; it shouldn't be too hard to port over the CCS plugin to work on the Mac. Of course there's the driver issue, but if the FET uses TI USB chips then it should be easy since "all TI chips have great OSX drivers". Or so TI says. :)

--Derek

Ki,

CCS v5 for Linux works great. Given how close Linux is to Unix, how difficult would it be to support Mac OS X?

I vote to get support for OS X as well :)

CCS for OS X - Yes please !  

Running VMs is really poor form for such a nice operating system.

I've been getting some successes with the MSP-FET430UIF and the ez430U to run natively and using xcode for development (there also appears to be some LLVM efforts for msp430 which will allow a pretty awesome debug/development experience in xcode but I haven't got around to getting that up and running yet).

Overall I must say that so far the experience is quite painful in getting this up and running natively, however it will still be worth it if I don't need to use another OS.

Hello,

I'm sorry to report that we still do not have any plans to support OS X. As mentioned, CCSv5 will support various flavors of Linux and that is our current focus. Linux may be close to Unix but the amount of effort to port, test/validate CCS on OS X is still not a trivial task. Sorry.

ki

I understand why supporting OSX could be too much effort.

However, I suggest that you at least build your command-line compilers for OSX and make those available to brave developers like myself who are willing to try it without support.  If you are building on Linux, then it should be no effort at all to build on OSX.

Also, if you could open up the source for the USB Emulator client code that is used by the debugger, then I would be willing to try and get something working between gdb and the XDS510-USB2.0 hardware.

In other words, please consider leveraging the open source community and other volunteers to take on some of the effort.  There's no reason to completely exclude OSX when unsupported binaries and limited source can be made available as a starting point.

Thanks Ki for the frank response and I can appreciate that it would not be a trivial port even from linux. 

It is a shame however as I think you're cutting out a growing community of embedded engineers and students that prefer OS X. We're a pretty savvy community so I agree with Brian, the more drivers etc you can open source or provide the better. We may not have CCS, but if we can at least compile, install and communicate with the hardware through command line utilities, I think most of us would be happy.

thanks again,

Phil

To elaborate on my suggestions a little:

1) If I had the compiler, assembler, and linker tools compiled for OSX as binary executables, then I am 100% certain that I could create an Xcode project that would allow me to edit and build for Texas Instruments processors.  Also handy would be tools like hex55 and such that are used after the compile+link phase.  Even dis55 compiled for OSX would be useful.  In other words, we don't really need Eclipse for OSX.  Eclipse would be welcome, but it also should not be a hurdle stopping progress.

2) If I had open source for the USB Emulator client code, I am somewhat sure that I might be able to make a go of adapting the hardware debugger to gdb.  This premise is a bit more iffy, since gdb might not be happy with the exact requirements.  It's still worth opening up for the community to take a stab at it, and I assume it would only help TI to have open source emulator drivers.

I totally agree with Brian and Phiip. Actually I would like to have command line building tools (cl2000 for example) on Mac OS X. I don't really care if it TI provides an eclipse interface at all. If there is a command line loading tool, that will be great. Hope that is much less work and will make many users happy. There are larger and lager amount of Mac users nowadays, it surely will open a larger market for TI. 

So do I. Even if it takes some effort to port the drivers to OS X we would face the challenge just to avoid using a virtual machine. I like the development tools under OS X and it would be great if we could use them building our DSP binaries (using C6713 an C6455 for audio signal processing).

TI's clumsy support for the Mac is the main reason why we are using FTDI and skipping TI for USB for our new designs.

But don't get me wrong -- I love the MSP430 line. It's just that coding for it is a pain because of Windows and Java.

FTDI's support of OS X is not the best story either. I have trouble where a non-serial port product uses the FTDI bridge chip for its USB interface. I also use a FTDI based USB to RS-232 adapter. The FTDI driver grabs all the devices for serial ports and the application for my other product fails because it can not access its FTDI part. FTDI's responce was:

================================

With Mac OS X, our VCP and D2XX drivers are mutually exclusive.  You can only have one driver installed at a time.
 
With Linux and Windows, you can have both drivers installed with no problems.

================================

I agree with most of the people on this thread, I have many more customers using Mac in their engineering departments than ever before. I have assembled a list of electrical engineering/embedded software on my web site if anyone is interested,

http://www.rau-deaver.org/Links.html

Ti, please  make a native Mac OSx version of CCS.   

I would love to see this cross-platform support for CCS.  

Definitely another vote for Mac OS CCS here. I'd really like to develop on my Macbook Pro natively without launching a VM. 

And yet another vote from the Swedish jury :-)

And, while waiting for TI to embrace OS X... Can you guys tell me which VM you are using? (I'm aware that this is a bit off-topic, sorry for that)

I'm a fairly new Mac user (but quickly fell in love with it - I never want to pay for a MS OS again!).

To start with, I want to be able to at least build c66x applications using my iMac. Of course, I eventually would like to be able to debug and profile, too.

BR /Marten

Hi Marten,

I'm using VMWare Fusion V3.2, but a new V4.0 version is avaliable at a special introductory price at the moment. You can dowload a 30 days test version free of charge (see the press release on the V4.x here http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-fusion-091411.html) here http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_fusion/4_0

Rgds
aBUGSworstnightmare

Marten,

VMware and VirtualBox are common ones used within TI. I use VMware quite a bit and have had good success.

Thanks

ki

Hi all.

I've been using the FET340UIF with the MSP-EXP340F5438 for a while and used mspdebug and the mspgcc toolchain on mac.

My most urgent request would be to provide reliable working drivers for the TU3410 USB-2-UART chip included in virtually all MSP430 products/kits.

Using the "provided as is" version, I can control the FET340UIF. However, the driver crashes at times, and if I don't reload the driver kernel module immediately, the whole USB subsystem crashes and I have to hard reboot. Also, if I plug in two of those chips, the kernel crashes right away - I've heard the same happens on Windows, too.

TI: Please find a company that has experience with OS X drivers and have them write new drivers for your TU3410. 

There's no need/point in having a CCS if it cannot reliably talk to the FET340 and the other programming boards.

Best 

Matthias Ringwald

Marten Cederholm said:

And yet another vote from the Swedish jury :-)

And, while waiting for TI to embrace OS X... Can you guys tell me which VM you are using? (I'm aware that this is a bit off-topic, sorry for that)

I'm a fairly new Mac user (but quickly fell in love with it - I never want to pay for a MS OS again!).

To start with, I want to be able to at least build c66x applications using my iMac. Of course, I eventually would like to be able to debug and profile, too.

BR /Marten

I would definitely choose VitualBox. It's free and it runs great. I think VMware requires a little more power and memory than VirtualBox does because it has so many more features that you don't need anyway.

On the downside VirtualBox doesn't support 3D graphics. The only need i've had for that is when i wanted to play some of my old Windows games (before i switched to mac), so it's not like you need it. But i guess you can try out both and see what you like.

Regards,
Steve 

Marten,

I use BootCamp and simply run Windows XP directly on an Intel Mac.

I'm not sure why you would be searching for a VM if you're interested in debugging.  The Eclipse environment in CCS 3 and CCS 4 is already fragile enough when it comes to maintaining a link with the hardware emulator via USB.  Many times, Eclipse will simply lock up, needing to be killed by the Task Manager.  In other words, I would not want to take the chance of running the USB emulator inside a Virtual Windows setup.  Much better to be debugging with native OS support.

Matthias,

It seems to me that you should start a new topic. USB Drivers for the TU3410 are not really very closely related to Code Composer Studio.

That said, TI would not need a driver on OSX if the UART features were USB Class compliant. Mac OS X has excellent system support for USB Class compliant devices.  If you are having trouble with the TU3410, then perhaps the USB Device is not fully Class compliant. It would be better to fix things so that no driver is needed at all. This approach works best on OSX.

Brian Willoughby

Sound Consulting

Hi Brian

Starting a separate thread is a good idea. I just stumbled upon the original post while looking for something else and thought: "don't need fancy IDE, need a working toolchain". As I said the TU3410 is in all MSP430 programming devices by TI, so CCS couldn't be used on Mac for MSP430 even if it would exist.

No drivers are of course the best. However, do you know of a USB-2-UART chip that doesn't require drivers? Even the FTDI series, which works well on Mac, requires drivers. Maybe Windows cannot use CDC at all, even with drivers? :)

Best

Matthias

So, where is that separate thread, Matthias?

This is turning into a general Mac support topic, but I will briefly say that only the FTDI series requires drivers. Unfortunately, the FTDI Chip line is too popular, much more popular than it should be given how poorly it works. All other CDC devices that I have used will simply work on OSX without a driver. Many of these are based on the PIC chip, which can be programmed to be compliant with any USB Class.

I am not familiar with the TU3410, and it does not appear anywhere when I search on the Texas Instruments site by part number. If it is merely a transceiver, then you should be able to program your MSP430 to be USB CDC Class compliant. If not, then I have no idea what to suggest since I can find no data sheets for this part.

Hi

there's no separate thread (yet). The TUSB3410 is used as USB-2-UART chip to be able to communicate to the MSP430 chip over UART in those cases.

Before, I used Silabs USB-2UART chips with the BTnode (http://btnode.ethz.ch), it worked perfect on Linux, and rather well, but not perfect on Mac, it required a driver.

I've use the very cheap Profilic USB-2-RS232 cables which needed drivers and had to be patched.

As for the TUSB3410 (I hope I didn't mispell it before). It's shown here: http://www.ti.com/product/tusb3410

I would definitely not used it in my design :) but it's used in by all MSP430 dev tools, e.g the eZ430 dev kits, http://www.ti.com/tool/ez430-f2013

Then, it is used by the MSP-FET340UIF - http://www.ti.com/tool/msp-fet430uif

and also on the newest MSP430 board: http://www.ti.com/tool/msp-exp430f5529

I should clarify my comments, since I started out referring to "drivers" and later suggested that (actual) drivers should be discussed in another topic.

What I mean by those seemingly contradictory statements is that USB CDC drivers for any given operating system should not be part of this thread or part of CCS. Some emulators will be proprietary, and some will be class compliant. The Class compliant emulators should have a two-layer solution, where the low-level USB CDC Driver is provided by OSX, and a higher-level "emulation" layer should exist on top of the standard serial devices that are part of the BSD Unix segment of OSX. Proprietary emulators that are not class compliant would still need high-level "drivers" that would handle both layers. Fortunately, OSX allows user level code to talk directly to USB Devices, so the proprietary emulators could easily be handled by high-level "drivers" without writing actual kernel drivers.

For the purposes of this discussion, I put "drivers" in quotes when I am talking about a piece of plugin code that is specific to CCS and which talks to emulators. When I use driver without quotes, I'm talking about an official driver installed in OSX. I have a great deal of experience with OSX and have developed several USB devices, both class compliant and proprietary, and I see no reason that CCS should need any actual OSX drivers. Everything can be handled with higher level user code rather than system code.

Matthias,

There are plenty of better directions for you to choose. It seems that you have tried several USB-to-serial adaptors that have poor performance. The TUSB3410 seems like a wasteful choice for an MSP430 design, because the TUSB3410 incorporates a 24 MHz 8052 processor which loads and executes its own firmware. Such a design ends up with two processors on the same board (the 8052 and the 430) with severe limitations on the efficiency of the USB communications. The TUSB3410 is probably better suited to legacy serial designs that cannot be updated, whereas if you are creating a new MSP430-based product then it would make more sense to streamline your hardware and firmware design to reduce redundancy.

I would recommend that you select one of the many MSP430 chips that incorporate USB on board. There are a couple of dozen choices. MSP430 + USB - TI.com

With USB on the MSP430, you will have better control over the data and control flow.

Hi Bill

thanks for all your well intended advice. However, you're missing the point, or rather, you have to tell TI about the limitations of using the TUSB3410. This chip is build into all TI MSP430 development boards you can purchase today, so I'm merely interested in using those boards as they are. (Also, I'm software guy and not developing any MSP430 based hardware). I shouldn't have highjacked this thread. Sorry.

Best , Matthias

I see discussion still continues regarding TI supporting CCS sw dev for the MPS430 on Mac OS X.  The last time I posted here was about 2 years ago (1 Jul 2010 8:54 PM):

TI's MCU products look attractive and I can see interesting possibilities for them.  However, I find it a disappointment that your dev tools are so wedded to the Windows OS.  Yes, those of us who prefer OS X are aware of the various ways to get Windows running on a Mac.  But being required to jump through such hoops just to proceed with MCU dev is, IMO, unacceptable.

Until TI comes up with native OS X tools, I will stick with Arduino and its excellent multi-platform software support.

As others posting here have noted, many folks prefer Macs for dev work.  No doubt many more use Macs now than 2 years ago.  I wonder if TI's response to this trend will move beyond forum posts in the next 2 years.

Hi, all,

It would be great if we can have CCS for MacOSX! I am a DSP programmer as well as MacOSX user.  In order to develop/debug DSP code,

I have to run DSP debugger in VMware, which is really slow and resource-consuming. CCS can be executed on Linux and CCS is actually

a plug-in for Eclipse, I don't see any obstacle for TI to port CCS to MacOSX. Personally I prefer to have the same CCS environment on MacOSX, i.e.

Eclipse-based CCS. After all, TI should maintain product consistency among platforms. For people who prefer to customize their tools, e.g. Xcode/Emacs,

they can easily integrate them into Xcode/Emacs once TI provides native CCS toolchain binary. 

I'm trying to figure out how to use CCS Windows binary and wine to run it on MacOSX. But I really want a native CCS on MacOSX! Thanks, TI!

Please put Mac OS X development on your road map soon!  There are many of us that want it!

Thanks

Please port it!

Thanks

Just to give everyone an update - We have some tentative plans to support MAC OS in the future. And initially, support would be limited to a few devices. Since the plans are tentative, there are no specific dates or devices I can name as of right now (so please hold your questions regarding those). But I just wanted to let everyone know that it is on the table and something we are looking to do.

Thanks

ki

Now That's good news! 

Thank you!

Thanks, TI, for these fabulous devices and experimental boards.  Please add my vote to the folks who would appreciate ANY tools for building on Mac OS.  CCS would be a dream, but even some minimal command line tools would be welcome.  Many of us are competent to compile and debug purely on the command line.

Right now my solution is VMware.  

+1 for native CSS (using latest Eclipse and CDT) on Mac OS X CCS :)

Right now my solution is VirtualBox -- works well but chews up more RAM, different meta keys between systems (ctrl v command), different versions of Eclipse (4.2 v 3.7 CCS).

I use Eclipse Juno (4.2) on OS X for code browsing, editing for C/C++, generally using Makefiles.  If the compiler/debuggers could be ported to OS X that would be a good start, as then we could customise build commands.  It shouldn't be that difficult as it is POSIX like and I know there are MSP430 mac ports for gcc and clang.

Of course a fully supported distribution would be great ;-)

On a side note, my biggest issue with CDT is storing the .cproject file under source control (Bazaar) and using branches, but I think this is a more general Eclipse issue.  

Another vote for a native CCS osx native app!

+4

We are with two, and have four machines. So +4 ;-)

VMWare is too slow and our target is that it should connect to OSX using USB. And switching is so annoying.

+1 vote for native OSX CCS.

I vote for a native CCS on Mac OSX too.

+1 for me.

I really appreciate a native support for Mac OS X. It is boring and slow to run a virtual machine windows style just to run CCS. Having a native support could also benefit the interface with Matlab/Simulink environment in such a way that also an education usage of CCS comes into the play.

CCS in OSX would be nice. I have had a Mac for years. Another chipmaker I have done business with provides its application in OSX.

To be honest, I am not thrilled about CCS at all, but the command line support would definitely be an awesome idea!

Also, yes, yes, yes, please: more open source softwares and collaboration with the community! TI can just benefit out of that!