MacOS X CCSv6

Overview

This page contains information regarding Code Composer Studio v6.1.3 running on MacOS X. It includes general information as well as known issues.

Projects and Build

• Avoid project names that have spaces in them, especially for RTSC projects. Also avoid installing RTSC tools (TI-RTOS, SYS/BIOS etc.) in directories that have spaces in the directory name. In older versions of RTSC tools, there were build issues when working with projects that had spaces in the workspace path or software package path. Although these issues should be resolved in latest versions of RTSC tools, it is still advisable to generally avoid spaces in paths.

Working with TI software packages

• MSPWare is currently not available in CCS App Center, but can be downloaded and installed separately from http://www.ti.com/tool/MSPWARE. There is a MacOS specific installer available there.
• Other packages (TivaWare, Controlsuite, BLE Stack etc.) do not have Mac installers. You can install the software on Windows and copy the contents over to Mac.
• After the software packages are installed, Resource Explorer can be configured to discover them. Go to the Resource Explorer home, click on Configure Resource Explorer to discover examples, documentation and generates a resource package. Click on Add, and browse to the location of the package.

Bluetooth Low Energy Software Stack (BLE-STACK)

The BLE-Stack SDK installer is currently available for Windows only. It can be installed on Windows and then copied over to the Mac. The CCS projects in BLE-Stack SDK can be imported and built on MacOS after making some modifications. Please use the steps below as a guideline:

For BLE-STACK-2-2:

1. Copy BLE-SDK 2.02.00.31 to Mac. This version of BLE-SDK is tested with and requires XDCTools v.3.32.00.06 and TI-RTOS for CC26xx and CC13xx v2.18.00.03

2. Copy XDC Tools 3_32_00_06_core to the folder where CCS is installed on the Mac (if it is not already installed)

3. Copy TI-RTOS 2_18_00_03 to the folder where CCS is installed on the Mac (if it is not already installed)

4. If TI-RTOS and XDC Tools were copied over to a folder other than /Applications/ti (or whichever directory CCS was installed to), then have CCS detect it by adding its path to Product Discovery path (under menu Code Composer Studio->Preferences->Code Composer Studio->RTSC->Products)

5. Import the desired CCS project(s) (the steps below are for SensorTag project)

6. For Stack projects, Go to Project Properties->Build->Variables tab. Click on Show System Variables to view all variables. Edit the variable CC26XXWARE to point to its location on the Mac system (make sure the c:/ prefix is removed)

7. For App projects, go to Project Properties->General->RTSC tab and ensure that TI-RTOS for CC13xx/CC26xx v2.18.00.03 is selected

8. For App projects, go to Project Properties->Build->Variables tab. Click on Show System Variables to view all variables. Edit the variables CC26XXWARE and TI_RTOS_DRIVERS_BASE to point to their location on the Mac system (make sure the c:/ prefix is removed)

9. Before building, the file lib_linker.cmd that is required for the build must be copied to the project folder. In Windows this is handled automatically as a pre-build step (by calling lib_search.exe), but this will not run on Mac. There are couple of ways to handle this:

One way to do this is to compile the respective projects in either IAR or CCS on Windows and then copy the lib_linker.cmd file (generated in C:\ti\simplelink\ble_sdk_2_02_00_31\examples\cc2650stk\sensortag\ccs\config directory) to the corresponding location in the Mac file system. If the projects were already compiled once in Windows before the BLE stack software was copied over to the Mac, then the above step is not required.

The file looks like below. Once the file is available on the Mac, the paths should be edited for the Mac.

/*
 * DO NOT MODIFY. This file is automatically generated during the pre-build
 *                step by the lib_search utility
 */
"C:\ti\simplelink\ble_sdk_2_02_00_31\blelib\host\host_pxxx.a"
"C:\ti\simplelink\ble_sdk_2_02_00_31\blelib\ctrl\cc2640\cc2640_ctrl_pxxx.a"
"C:\ti\simplelink\ble_sdk_2_02_00_31\blelib\hci_tl\cc26xx\cc26xx_hci_tl_none.a"

Another way is to run the tools using the python source provided with the SDK. Starting with BLE-Stack v2.2, the python source for the lib_search.exe and other tools like frontier.exe tools are provided in the SDK 'tools' folder. Refer to CC2640 BLE Software Developer's_Guide (SWRU393) for more details.
If you have python installed you can change "${TOOLS_BLE}/lib_search/lib_search.exe" in the project's pre-build steps (Project properties->Build->Steps tab) to python "${TOOLS_BLE}/lib_search/src/lib_search.py". You may also need to change the backslashes in the searchpath elements in ble_sdk_2_02_00_31/tools/lib_search/params_split_cc2640.xml to forward slashes to get this to work though.

Reference:This thread has some details on getting all this to work on Linux, and the steps should be similar for Mac OS : https://e2e.ti.com/support/wireless_connectivity/bluetooth_low_energy/f/538/t/412962

10. Build the Stack project
Note: There is one known bug when building on MacOS with parallel build option enabled: see this link for details. The message does not interfere with the build process itself so the build should complete.

11. Build the App project
Note: There is one known issue where the build fails. Workaround is documented in this forum thread.

12. Most Stack examples have a post-build step that calls a tool such as frontier.exe. These steps will fail as the tools are only available for Windows. While the failure of the post-build step does not impact the build itself, you can avoid the error by either removing the post-build step or by modifying it to use the Python sources as mentioned in Step 9.

Accessing serial ports

Many TI example applications use UART serial connection to display information on the host side. On MacOS, you can use System Information or System Profiler to see the USB devices connected to your Mac (for eg, the XDS110 will be listed there).

To open System Information, press and hold the Option key on your keyboard, and click the Apple menu OR use Spotlight to search for "System Information".

For ports not listed under System Information, open a terminal and type:
ls /dev/tty.*

Once you have the port name, you can read that serial port using the screen command, like this
screen /dev/tty.[yourSerialPortName] [yourBaudRate]

For example:
screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A6004byf 9600

While other full fledged GUI-oriented Terminal programs for MacOS may exist (this web page is one reference), screen is a quick and easy one to use.