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By Steve Nance
#14391
I just recently got a Reflow Toaster kit and am ready to work on the code to automate it some. The docs said they used the CC5X compiler to write the sample code. I downloaded the free version, but it won't work for this application.

I don't want to buy yet another special purpose compiler for this very short project. Does anyone know of a decent free compiler I could use for this project that would do what I'm trying to do?

Steve
By Philba
#14395
why don't you think the cc5x compiler won't work?

is it some feature of the compiler or you can't get it to work at all?
By Steve Nance
#14398
It is limited to 1k in code size and it complains many functions (printf and math) are not supported in the free version.
By Philba
#14409
I hear you but you'll find most free versions have some sort of limitation.

For example, the mikroC compiler free version has a 2K code limit but it turns out that it's code gen is about 1/2 as good as cc5x. I found that one app I did in both was twice as big with mikroC.

cc5x limits you to 1K per compiled module. You can break your code up into seperate files and do it that way. It's a little tricky and some optimizations aren't available.

Are you doing PID temp control? is that why you need better math support than the free compiler gives? I think that could be overcome.
By Kuroi Kenjin
#14412
Philba's right. The CC5X code size is per module. The manual tells you how to get around it. 1K of instructions is a lot of code, and frankly, shouldn't be a single source file anyways.

Also I believe that if you download and look at the Bloader source code, you'll find that all or many of the routines Sparkfun uses, they wrote themselves.
By Steve Nance
#14413
Ok, thanks for the hints. I'll try the suggestions and see if I can resolve the problems.
By Philba
#14414
while we are at it, I've found printf implimentations to be pretty big. I created my own putc, puts, puthex etc - pretty simple to do and takes up a lot less space. It doesn't take much to format simple output for an LCD either, probably the biggest is the decimal output formatting.

I noticed that the author uses the paid for version for bloader - it's bigger when you compile with the free one. the difference being the optimization size cc5x notes you are missing out on.

But, hey. It would be cool if you tried a bunch of different free ones and told us about your experience.