I recently bought some MSP430 development tools from Texas Instruments (ez430 chronos) and went on to install the "Offical and supported Development tool" Code Composer Studio 5.4...
It has the following problems:
- very large program, based on Eclipse (that also suffers from some of the Emacs problems of growing ad nausea in features that only a few people use).
- incredible tools for managing projects from the IDE, fantastic.. except this is a micro-controller development platform. If you program has more that 32 code files (.c or .asm) you probably should rethink you program... and if RCS or CVS cannot manage your multiple projects... you should not be developing for micro-controllers.
- After many tries (I am not very patient, nor skillful with point and click interfaces) I managed to compile my program and debug...
- the main window has so many subwindows that it is impossible to use on a laptop, you need a 32 inch TV to use the interface... it is nuts!
I thought that was horrible, but then I installed AVR Studio 6.1, if the former program (CCS 5.4) is large the latter is huge...
Has the following problems:
- during install, further "support modules" are downloaded, including one of 1.2Gb!!! Microsoft Visual Studio something - HORRIBLE!
- combining AVR and ARM tools is a bad idea, why do I have two toolchains when I only want one of them!
- same problem with the windows as CCS but in some way we have less subwindows.. maybe its a bit better..
- to update you need to register! why ? did't I already had to register to download... leave me alone! And then it fails with a crash!
- I tried to install AVR Studio 5.1 first... but doesn't work, fails during install....
- I'm going to try to install 4.19... I need to update my AVR Dragon and AVR ISP2... that's why!
Ahhhhhhh! were did all go so wrong! Give us an editor, a simple project manager, an assembler, a c-compiler, a simulator and a debugger, that's it how difficult can it be! give us some icons in the interface and nothing else!
TODO:
Uninstall both horrible tools, install AVRSTudio 4.19 (because I need the simulator a bit), avrsimul in linux is getting better so maybe in the future there will be no need even for this.
Developing with MSP430 appears simple in linux (although the install is a bit more complicated), the tools for AVR install quite easily with a special one-click install for OpenSUSE (installing arduino tools).
