Hi danielchen,
There really needs to be more transparency from NXP in the SDK process. This was discussed in What is the SDK Version for Parts listed in the "MCUXpresso Supported Devices Table"? and it keeps causing us developers to knock our heads against the walls of varying hardness when working with parts.
I like working with SDK 2.7.0 but the parts I want to work with have SDKs of 2.3.1 and 2.2.0 which is a lot more difficult and requires a certain amount of ingenuity and hard work to make sure you have the right drivers and source code (none of which is documented). I have asked repeatedly if and when the SDKs for the parts I'm working with are going to be brought up to the latest standard (and have offered to help in the process) with no response (which tells me they're not). I have also asked what is the process for creating an SDK for a part and only received silence (to which I assume the process is manual as well as time consuming and because it is not well designed it can't be automated, which makes me question NXP's technical capabilities).
There is no document listing what drivers, middleware, etc. and MCUXpresso Wizards are available for specific devices. I don't know how to be maze-bright selecting an NXP part without posting a million questions here and then loading the part's SDKs to try and understand how much work it will take to get the part working in the application I am developing.
Does NXP management understand that the MCUXpresso and SDK tools, while very good when they are at the latest levels (which only seems available for the parts built in select Freedom and Tower boards), are often difficult and cranky to use with requiring differing amounts of testing and experimenting required to get code working for all other parts? This adds a great deal of uncertainty when developing applications becasue the level of wizard support is unknown and it is just about impossible to figure out, without NXP support on this board. Along with that, understanding which sample boards can be used for verifying the operation of peripherals and other features of the target board is not intuitive or documented in locations that can be easily found.
I'm saying this as a customer that is growing more and more reluctant to consider NXP devices going forwards in the future because I don't know what the SDK plan and feature availability is for the parts I'm using right now; I might as well look to other OEMs as the effort required to evaluate their parts is the same as evaluating a new to me Kinetis or LPC part number.
myke
