oPossum 1,083 Posted August 12, 2015 Share Posted August 12, 2015 Edit: Upgrades to CCS are now free, not the entire product. An initial purchase is still required. Just got this email from TI: Starting with upcoming Code Composer Studio tripwire, bluehash and dubnet 3 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
tripwire 139 Posted August 12, 2015 Share Posted August 12, 2015 Another possible interpretation would be that once you buy it, all upgrades are free forever. That would be awesome too. The $500 price is cheap compared to the competition. I think it might be this. Until now, when you buy a licence you also get 1 year of subscription which entitles you to free major upgrades (5->6, 6->7 etc). Minor version updates are always free. Once the subscription runs out you needed to renew to get any major updates. It sounds like TI are dropping the subscription aspect, but the initial licence still needs to be paid for. EDIT: Confirmed at http://www.ti.com/tool/CCSSUB: Previously, annual subscription was used to determine if a user would receive major upgrades to Code Composer Studio (CCS). When you purchased CCS, it came with 12 months of subscription and it could then be renewed on a yearly basis afterwards. Minor updates were provided regardless of subscription status, but upgrades from CCS v4 to v5, or to v6 required active subscriptions. This is no longer required. bluehash and oPossum 2 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
dubnet 238 Posted August 12, 2015 Share Posted August 12, 2015 I let my 5.5 subscription lapse and it looks like I would have to renew in order to get on the perpetual upgrade train. EDIT: Jumped the gun....found this: http://www.ti.com/tool/ccssub Looks like a V5 license will get you on the perpetual upgrade train. EDIT #2: Thanks TI !!! oPossum, bluehash and tripwire 3 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
oPossum 1,083 Posted August 12, 2015 Author Share Posted August 12, 2015 Ahh. That link has a better explanation. It is still necessary to purchase CCS, but all upgrades are now free. Same model as Windows 10. Buy once and upgrade forever until corporate policy changes. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
bluehash 1,581 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 Another possible interpretation would be that once you buy it, all upgrades are free forever. That would be awesome too. The $500 price is cheap compared to the competition. I'm seeing $159 for a floating licence @@oPossum. The subscription used to be $500... I think. I agree this is good news! Edit:$159 is for the user pack. Not sure what that means. It's now disabled. $495 for a license. Still worth it. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
asgard20032 9 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 EDIT: its 495$, i was reading the wrong thing What is 495$? I see 159$. I think we will have to wait a few hour/day for TI to adjust the pricing/info on the website to reflect their new policy. It will finally be more adequate for student like me to buy CCS. At around 100-200$, i might consider buying a license for development on msp430 & msp432 & CCxxx platform, and buy a crosswork for all my arm related work (although they don't offer lifetime upgrade, they are still affordable. One of the great thing of this CCS offer is one low-medium price = lifetime upgrade, no limit, commercial usage for every of their micro-controller. The main disadvantage of crosswork for student/hobbyist is the non commercial usage only. CCS would be one of the first engineering tool with an affordable price and lifetime upgrade allowing student/hobbyist to do some project for money. It will also help some startup. Anyone know other software that is either affordable and optionally include lifetime license? Any field related, as a student, its always good to know some software available that won't burn your wallet. For example, in audio, there is FL studio with lifetime upgrade and Renoise, a tracker at 60$. Renoise is good for 1 major upgrade. Both of those software say you may install on as many computer you own. Crosswork from Rowley, 150$, also say you can install on as many computer as you want. Is it the same with CCS?(crosswork is great because it does EVERY arm an hobyist could come across. Well, there is some exotic arm it don't do like the new wiznet, but every st, freescale, nxp, TI, atmel... it will do it.) Labview has a special student version costing around 30$. Install on up to two computer if i remember well. No upgrade. If you want the next version, buy it again. Same for multisim, special student version, altought i heard that the student version has some minor/major limitation depending on what you do. Around 40$ if i remember well, up to two computer. Autodesk will give student 2 year free about any of their software, renewable. I don't know on how many machine you may install. Linux is free for everyone, great OS, compatible with Crosswork, Renoise, CCS, and few other engineering tool. Great bargain for anyone Dreamspark (student only) for everything related to Microsoft product, can install everything from dreamspark on up to two computer. Microsoft OneNote is totally free without limitation since February, great for when experimenting to take note. Visual studio community is free for small business and student and hobbyist, same as visual studio professional. Unity and UDK now have free/affordable option. Microchip has free XC compiler, although with de optimization all over, to force people to buy the full one that will cost more than CCS. When you buy XC, its only for one architecture, contrary to CCS where you buy it for all TI's architecture. Atmel studio is totally free Kinetis studio is totally free LPCxpresso is free up to 256kb. Diptrace : Awesome price for student. For non-profit, its stated that we can't use it for commercial... but i see no where about the student license if we can make commercial usage of it (a student doing a side job on his own... a startup...) There is Amazon prime that offer TV streaming for a nice price for student. Not an engineering software, but nice. Although, the tv streaming service is not available in every country. Not some software/service, its worth mentioning that Terasic offer extremely cheap hardware for student wanting to play in FPGA field. What about 3d? PCB? Multimedia creating software? Whatever else? Hosting? Cloud service? Any other great hobbyist/student deal on software? Unfortunately, some company have some crippled student license, for example, there is Solidwork and Matlab where you buy a license for about 150-300$ that is only valid ONE year. So for a student, its not a great deal. Edit: Now i see 445$ for CCS download only single node license. At that price, it cost too much for a student when we consider paypal/credit card %, tax, and currency exchange. It would cost me around 33% extra on the listed price being Canadian when we consider all those factor. Having a student credit card, i am limited to 500$ per transaction. What would be great would be either they lower their price, or sell architecture specific version at a lower price, or they offer a student version with a possibility to upgrade that student version to a full version once we graduate. tripwire 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
bluehash 1,581 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 $159 is the upgrade fee for TMDSCCSUB12ALLF01 or 1 floating license. It has been revoked and adding to cart does not work. Some of us at 43oh got our CCS licenses for $25 a couple of years back for attending one of TI's webinars. $495 is great as an investment since it has a compiler for all TI's architectures - Tiva, MSP, C2000, Sitara and Simplelink. First few years of CC6 was wonky with upgrades breaking features. It has become alot more stable now using the app center for upgrades. I agree that having a lower price point for each architecture would be great. I know you can use CCS node locked on two MAC addresses.. Maybe two of you can team up? You can use CCS as a front end and gcc as a backend for ARM, using it for free at that point... Isn't that what Kinetis and Atmel studio do? Also most hobbyists stay under CCS's free limit of 32Kb and use dev kits which makes CCS free. By default when you install Code Composer Studio a free license will be enabled that supports working with development boards with an onboard debug interface, XDS1xx class debug probes, MSP430 with 16KB code size limit when using the TI compiler and 32KB code size limit with MSP432 and no limit when using GCC. A 90-day evaluation license is also available. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Rickta59 589 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 $495 for a license. Still worth it. How do you justify 500 dollars for a development tool for hobby use? Is the msp430 code it generates that much better than gcc? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
bluehash 1,581 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 How do you justify 500 dollars for a development tool for hobby use? Is the msp430 code it generates that much better than gcc? If you are seriously getting into embedded development, $500 with constant updates is a deal...whether you are a contractor or commercial entity. Although I wish they separated the compilers and offered it for a reasonable cost. I see people getting upset when they see CCS is not free. CCS is not fully crippled if you don't pay the fee. There are still free options. Start small, use the dev kits, use CCS integrated with GCC(edit:) or even use it under 16Kb/32Kb. I'm not sure if using the on-board ROM functions reduces the link count. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
asgard20032 9 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 The reason why a hobbyist would want to use TI compiler instead of gcc is to avoid bug in gcc (there are still some bug in GCC for msp430, especially for extended architecture 20 bits), because most of TI example are for their own compiler, and most of their library are written for their own compiler. Although, for many of their example/library, there is only minor modification needed to compile under gcc, for a hobbyist learning mcu.... messing with compiler specific thing is outside his learning scope for now. Also, TI compiler generate more optimized code. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
bluehash 1,581 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 Maybe, as a community, we ask TI to offer lower cost licences for the most used compilers( MSP/ARM/CC ). This might not have been a requested feature before, but since the Launchpad ecosys has grown, more people feel the need for it. I can help move the cause forward if I get community backing veryalive 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Rickta59 589 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 The reason why a hobbyist would want to use TI compiler instead of gcc is to avoid bug in gcc (there are still some bug in GCC for msp430, especially for extended architecture 20 bits), because most of TI example are for their own compiler, and most of their library are written for their own compiler. Although, for many of their example/library, there is only minor modification needed to compile under gcc, for a hobbyist learning mcu.... messing with compiler specific thing is outside his learning scope for now. Also, TI compiler generate more optimized code. msp430-elf-gcc is a TI lead effort. If there are bugs in it, they put them there. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
asgard20032 9 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 Maybe, as a community, we ask TI to offer lower cost licences for the most used compilers( MSP/ARM/CC ). This might not have been a requested feature before, but since the Launchpad ecosys has grown, more people feel the need for it. I can help move the cause forward if I get community backing Well, for every mcu a hobbyist/student may use, so every msp430 excluding industrial one (i think its w series), every arm mcu (excluding safety serie), the arm used in beaglebone, CC with an arm or msp430 core, and lastly, the lower end of their dsp series. With the exception of the DSP and arm safety used in the launchpad. They could call it CCS light edition, or CCS entry edition. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Rickta59 589 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 Maybe, as a community, we ask TI to offer lower cost licences for the most used compilers( MSP/ARM/CC ). This might not have been a requested feature before, but since the Launchpad ecosys has grown, more people feel the need for it. I can help move the cause forward if I get community backing I think that would add to their already insane testing burden. They are moving in the right direction, providing the ide on windows/linux and now mac. They have included open source compilers and provided a free option. Imagine if you had to test all that with every little change made, it is a huge effort. Lots of moving parts, too many internal and external groups that have to move forward together. Don't ask for a yet another thing to test. Leave them alone and just let the gcc stuff get better and better. I'm just suggesting you don't waste your money on a compiler that costs $500. In 5 years you won't care that you have a msp430 compiler. You will be using some new chip. -rick Quote Link to post Share on other sites
tripwire 139 Posted August 13, 2015 Share Posted August 13, 2015 I'm not sure if using the on-board ROM functions reduces the link count. Yes, it does. The ROM functions don't get linked into your executable, just these little trampoline stubs that jump into the ROM. It's possible for a DriverLib function to be smaller than the trampoline needed for the ROM version, but those are very rare. bluehash 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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