TI Wiki FAQ

Below is the FAQ, or a set of frequently-asked questions, for the Texas Instruments Embedded Processors Wiki.

Most importantly, please note that this is a public wiki, so company-sensitive material should not be posted here.

Contributing material

How do I create a topic?

Just follow a few simple steps:

1. Make sure you're logged in.
2. Enter the name of your wiki page, e.g. My New Wiki Page in your URL bar, e.g. http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/My_New_Wiki_Page.
3. On the page that comes up, click on the link to "edit this page".

What guidelines should I follow when contributing?

Please read the Author Best Practices page for tips.

When I create a page, how can I be sure nobody already created a similar topic?

When you create a topic and click 'Go', Mediawiki will also show similar topics. By default the 'Main' namespace is enabled - this encompasses all the Categories within the wiki. So you can be sure that all categories & topics have been searched before you make a new page.

How can I get my content translated into other languages?

If you're writing in English, this is easy - every page created will, by default, have an input at the top right-hand side, letting users translate its contents into a set of other languages; you can see one at the top of this page as well. The translation is currently done using the Google translation API. If your content is in another language, and that language is one of the eight languages supported by this wiki's translation, you just have to make sure that the name of the page you create has a "/" at the end, followed by that language's two-letter language code. (You can see all the language codes in the input at the top of this page.) That way the system will know that the page is in that language. As an example, see this page, which contains the first few paragraphs of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. The "/de" at the end of the page name lets the system know that the page is in German, and thus it knows how to translate the page correctly.

What is the policy on promotional material?

The wiki is for technical, collaborative information. It is not intended to be a platform to aggressively promote particular 3rd-party tool features. Please ensure topics on 3rd-party commerical offerings are objective, presenting only the technical details and referring users to other websites for pricing and sales information.

Editing and formatting

How can I embed videos in a page?

The TI wiki uses the EmbedVideo extension to let you insert videos: this extension supports the video services Dailymotion, Google Video, sevenload and YouTube, among others. There are a few ways to embed videos (see the extension page for the full documentation), but the easiest way is to call something like the following:

{{#evp:video service|video ID|caption|alignment}}

For example, the page Beagle Board Challenge: TurtleCam contains the following code, at the top:

{{#evp:youtube|cAkONcTP_aU|Project Video|right}}

Can I create a topic off-line, then post it once I'm happy with it?

Sure. We use this offline Mediawiki Editor. It works quite well.

How do I spell-check my contribution?

This is most easily done through the browser. Some browsers have a built-in spellchecker. In Internet Explorer, install the Google Toolbar then use Check > Autofix.

I don't like the WYSIWYG editor. How do I change back?

We installed a WYSIWYG editor called FCKEditor based on user demand. However, 'power-users' often prefer to stick to standard MediaWiki syntax with the help of the Extended Edit Buttons toolbar.

By default the WYSIWYG editor is off. However that only works for new users. It is more difficult to change the preferences for existing users. We are evaluating SQL methods to achieve this but it may take some time.

In the meantime you can easily flip back to using the standard edit buttons via: -

my preferences -> Misc

And then check the following boxes...

How do I syntax-highlight code examples?

Code references inlined into a text paragraph can use the <code> tag. An example

The doit() function cannot be called from main(), but rather must be called from a Task.

Blocks of code can be rendered with syntax highlighting using the <syntaxhighlight> tag. Some examples:

• Javascript -

<syntaxhighlight lang='javascript'> <syntaxhighlight lang="javascript"> // add remote codecs from the DSP server to the engine var Engine = xdc.useModule('ti.sdo.ce.Engine'); var myEngine = Engine.createFromServer(

   "video_copy", // Engine name (as referred to in the C app)
   "./video_copy.x64P", // path to server exe, relative to its package dir
   "ti.sdo.ce.examples.servers.video_copy.evmDM6446" // server package

); </syntaxhighlight>

• C code -

<syntaxhighlight lang='c'> <syntaxhighlight lang="c"> /* EDMA register address and definitions */

1. define CCNT *((volatile unsigned int *)(PARAMENTRY0 + 0x1C))

/* Allocate srcBuff and dstBuff. Do a cache flush and cache invalidate,if required. */ static signed char srcBuff[512]; static signed char dstBuff[512];

/* Step 1: EDMA initialization */ QUEPRI=0x10; QWMTHRA =(16<<8u)|(16 & 0xFF); </syntaxhighlight>

How can I make slideshows of images?

This wiki uses the Javascript Slideshow extension to let you embed a rotating series of images on a page. This is done using the "<slideshow>" tag - see the documentation for how to call it.

Categories

How do I associate my wiki topic with categories?

At the bottom of your wiki page, just list out the categories you want to add this page to, with one category per line - the topic will then show up automatically in each of them.

You just need to add at the bottom of the page something like:

[[Category:DVEVM]]
[[Category:Codec Engine]]

Please check that the categories exist and are spelled correctly when doing this. You can see the complete list of categories via Special:Categories. Please do not arbitrarily create too many categories - see "How do I create new categories?" below, for more information.

How do I create new categories?

In a nutshell, add at the end of your topic...

[[Category:Category name]]

Then click on that Category name - add some basic text e.g. This category contains information about Category name and then save it. Done! Now users can bookmark that specific category page and all articles referencing that category will automatically show up.

The CCSv4 Category is a nice example. At the top it has a nice intro and then at the bottom you automatically see all the topics listed that have been tagged with this category.

For more information on categories, you can read Wikipedia's help page on categories.

• NOTE - we are trying to keep the number of top-level categories to a minimum. For example, if new devices within a family come out it is too painful to retrofit 100s of topics to add that new category. Hence efforts are being made to keep top-level topics fairly generic. Subcategories are Ok e.g. see Category:Cplusplus. To make a subcategory simply add this at the bottom of the subcategory page.

[[Category:Parent Category name]]

Importing and uploading content

I wrote a bunch of content in the Twiki markup language, which is different syntactically from Mediawiki's. What can I do?

For TI employees, there is a Twiki-to-Mediawiki plugin installed - see here.

I have HTML, MS Word and Excel content I'd like to put in Mediawiki format. What can I do?

See this link and this link. There are many similar converters available if you search on the web.

As an example, let's say you have a .doc MS Word file with a few tables, etc. that you want to turn into Mediawiki format. To do this you could install Word2MediaWikiPlus. Essentially:

1. Download the latest Word2MediaWikiPlus version. Save the zip file anywhere.
2. Open up Word2MediaWikiPlus_Installer.doc, enable Macros. Follow the instructions and click Install or Update Macro
3. After some simple configuration this will give you a Convert To Wiki button. Open up your Word doc and click this button. This will go thru the article and convert it to Mediawiki format.
4. Select the whole article (CTRL-A), copy it (CTRL-C), and paste it into a Mediawiki article (CTRL-V). Done. Note that you probably dont want to save the converted .doc file directly in Word since it converts it "in-place". Just save it in the wiki directly.

Additionally, you can install the following macro, Excel2Wiki.zip, into MS Excel and it will create a Wikitext version of the chart for you to paste into your Wiki page. Instructions to install and use this macro are as follows:

1. Copy this file into your Program Files -> Microsoft Office -> Office11 folder.
2. Then in Excel, go to Tools -> Macro -> Visual Basic Editor
3. Right-click on any of the blank area in the “Project – VBAProject” window on the left side and choose "Import file". The Excel2Wiki.bas file should be available in the default directory that opens up.
4. To run the macro, go back to your table in the Excel file and highlight all the cells that you wish to convert to wiki format.
5. After highlighting, go to Tools -> Macro -> Macros and select “format as wiki table” and click "run".
6. The table should be completely converted preserving most, if not all, formatting and colors.

What file types can I upload?

Most of the key read-only file types are supported. For example if you have a Powerpoint Presentation, you must first convert it to PDF (using one of the many converters available), before uploading it. Options here include: -

• • pdf995. Free. Allows you to create PDF files by simply selecting the "print" command from any application
  • Adobe Standard. Not free but is able to convert and preserve embedded URL links in a .ppt (or .doc) when converted to a .pdf file.

What's the limit on file size uploads?

5MB. This wiki is not intended to be a repository for code! Split up presentation-PDFs etc. to keep size down.

Can I upload code?

Yes... however, see above! Sample code can be attached as tar.gz or zip files.

Products should not be uploaded on the wiki; instead you should link to a product release website. This wiki is not intended to be a software distribution channel, but can be used to provide links to products and other reference material.

Also, note that the TI Wiki Copyright article also has a section that's relevant to posting code.

Other

How do I delete a topic?

Several points to note here: -

• Users/authors can't directly delete topics. Only administrators can do this. If you want a topic deleted contact a TI admin (wiki guru)
• You can just delete all the content inside the topic. The TI cleanup script will eventually remove the page (algorithm based on lack of activity on a page, 0-content etc)
• If you have old content on wiki page X and the new, up to date content was posted on wiki page Y then consider using redirects. For example, if you type in xds 100 in the standard search box it redirects you to the XDS100 wiki topic. This is achieved (on the xds 100 wiki page) as follows (the text below should be the only text on the page:

#REDIRECT [[XDS100]]

What kind of statistics can I see about page popularity?

There are four pages that show different sets of popularity statistics:

• Popular pages shows a listing of the total number of hits to each page on the wiki, in descending order.
• Most Popular Authors shows a similar list, though it shows hits over a specific recent period of time as opposed to the overall number. It also shows, for each page, the first and most recent authors.
• Category Hits shows, for each category, the total number of hits to pages in that category.
• Category Statistics shows, for each category, the number of hits to each page in that category.

Finally, the Statistics page shows some general statistics about the wiki and its users.

How can I print out wiki pages?

On every page in the wiki, you can click on "Printable version" in the sidebar to get a version of the page formatted for printing - from there, just select "Print" from your browser's menu.

For a nicer-looking printing, you can actually create a "book" of wiki pages, thanks to the Collection extension installed on the TI wiki. To do that, click on "Create a book" in the sidebar, and then, in that page, click on "Start book creator". That will put you in a book-creation mode - every page you go to after that will have a box at the top that lets you add that page to the book. (Similarly, if you're on a category page, you can add all the category's pages to the book at once.) Once you're done adding pages to the book, click "Show book" from the top of any page to re-order the pages and give your book a title. Then, you can either print the book directly, or download it as a PDF file. Or you can cancel the book creation at any time by clicking on the "(disable)" link at the top.

Note that, unlike with regular printing, printing pages as a "book" means that you can't translate their contents into another language.

How can I get multiple search terms to point to the same place?

Consider using redirects. For exampl,e if you type in xds 100 in the standard search box it redirects you to the XDS100 wiki topic.

This is achieved (on the xds 100 wiki page) as follows:

#REDIRECT [[XDS100]]

How do I give feedback about a topic, or ask a question?

You can give feedback on topics by using the Discussion tab. The author (and everybody else) will be able to see the feedback if they're monitoring recent changes to the wiki via, say, an RSS feed. Please do not expect the topic to be modified to instantly address any questions posted on a talk page. Authors should do their best to respond to and apply feedback, though.