command line FET prgrammer

Hi-
I'm pretty new to all these different embedded technologies.  Currently
I'm using IAR KickStart to download our application to our devices and
it's very cumbersome.  We have several TI FET programmers(3 USB and one
parallel).  Because there are many different versions(different version
for each client) of our application, I wanted to create a desktop app
that could list available version, then by double clicking I could
invoke a command like util to download the application to the device
via our FET.

Does that sounds reasonable?

Do any of you know of an application (open source and free would be
nice) that would interface with the FET programmer from TI(USB would be
nice since it carries enough supply voltage for us)?

Any suggestions would be great.
I'm not familiar with "Boot Strap Loader", I've seen it in my books and
online, but am not sure how it works.  We are using the JTAG interface.

Thanks for your time,
Steve

steve wrote:
> Do any of you know of an application (open source and free would be
> nice) that would interface with the FET programmer from TI(USB would be
> nice since it carries enough supply voltage for us)?

You haven't said for which uC or DSP you need the programming software!

If it is for the MSP430 series, then one solution is
  http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/tools.html

For their DSP's like F2812 I think there are no open source or free 
tools. Of course, you could go to www.sourceforge.net and do a search...

  - Jan

I'm sorry, yes, it was for the MSP430

I have looked at mspgcc tools and I'm not confident it will do what I
need without switching over to almost the entire MSPGCC tool set/chain

TI has some samples where they show the use of their gang programmer
DLL, I'm currently waiting to hear from support if such an example
exists for the USB version of the FET.

Thank you for your post.
PS:  if this post appears at top, I'm sorry.. it was sent via google.

steve wrote:
> I'm sorry, yes, it was for the MSP430
> 
> I have looked at mspgcc tools and I'm not confident it will do what I
> need without switching over to almost the entire MSPGCC tool set/chain
> 

If you look harder, you'll see that there is absolutely no requirement 
to switch to the rest of the gcc toolchain (although if you look too 
hard, you may find yourself switching anyway, since it is an excellent 
set of tools).

Support for the USB FET is more recent, so you might have to search 
around a little (look in the mailing list archives) rather than having a 
nice direct link.


> TI has some samples where they show the use of their gang programmer
> DLL, I'm currently waiting to hear from support if such an example
> exists for the USB version of the FET.
> 
> Thank you for your post.
> PS:  if this post appears at top, I'm sorry.. it was sent via google.
> 

HI David,

You're right, it does seem to be able to be used as a standalone.
I re-evaluated our needs and eneded up buying the TI 8 chip gang
programmer.  It comes with a DLL that exports the functionality I would
need to integrate into our utilities.  

Thanks for the reply!
Steve