Why Freescale

[rayhall]

As there is no general discussion area on this forum I had no choice and posted this here.

I keep asking myself this question "Why Freescale". The more I do, the more frustrated I become for selecting Freescale for my product. I was warned before I started to avoid Freescale and use some other MCU. I ignored this and now I am learning how dumb it was to ignore this advice. I was told there is no support and there is no code examples to help with development.

These are the pros and cons as I see it.

Pros:

1. Automotive grade MCU

Cons:

1. No useful support from Freescale. The support people only know how to direct you to the Freescale website to look at things you already have seen.

2. Freescale has no software engineers to provide support. Only have people you know how to provide a link to some page Freescale website.

3. No engineers with automotive experience available to customer for support. Only one I found was out of date with the current automotive hardware.

4. Requests for a list of software engineers with automotive experience, that sub contract code writing, resulted in being sent a link the Freescale website which was useless. Asked again and was told to contact the local Freescale distributor in my area. Contacted them and they could not help.

5. Forum is not supported by Freescale. Easy to understand this as they have no one who can answer questions. Just good at providing links to pages on the website.

6. This Forum is next to dead. Simple questions go unanswered. Easy to understand as Freescale do nothing to generate more customers.

7. Google "Freescale Example Code" and you get nothing. Do the same for ATMEL or Microchip and you get thousands of websites on the subject.

8. CodeWarrior is far too expensive. Should be free. They sell so little hardware (MCU) that they have to make money selling software.

9. CodeWarrior has next to no examples.

10. Processor Expert does not support Xgate.

What Freescale should do,

1. Employ software engineers to work on support.

2. Engineers write many code examples.

3. These engineers answer customers questions on this forum and via the service requests.

4. This forum have a Tutorial section where the engineers write tutorials on basic things like, how to use ADC, SPI, SCI, etc..

5. Make CodeWarrior free, or make the current free version support much bigger code.

6. Freescale should ask themselves "why are Atmel and Microchip so popular, and look at what they are doing correctly.

I firmly believe that Freescale is only interested in sales on MCU to OEM car makers, and not someone that will use less then 1000 MCU a year.

I would love to be proved wrong on all this points..

Ray.

[Lundin]

I think this sums up the Freescale experience rather well. The lack of pre-made, properly tested drivers for peripherals is very annoying. If there exists an app note, it is written by some random FAE who knows the general idea but lacks in-depth knowledge about both the peripheral and C programming. At best, you get some bare bone, bit-banging mess filled with "magic numbers". No API, no encapsulation, nothing hinting of OO design. With all the benefits of a high-level language removed, it might as well have been written in raw assembler.

To be fair it is not just Freescale that have these problems, Renesas, Texas, ST et al are equally bad in this area. At the same time, Atmel and Microchip, who have awful CPU cores, sell their products solely on time to market and user friendliness.

[GregC]

I wish that your message has been heard and I keep my fingers crossed to see as quickly as possible some changes, but I believe that it will require a certain time to attend the same level of software support than Microchip or Atmel ...

Nevertheless, there are encouraging signs with the new Freescale Kinetis-L family (ARM Cortex-M0+ core) and the software package associated to its community board FRDM-KL25Z (http://www.freescale.com/FRDM-KL25Z) considering official launch was September 25th.

[GordonD]

Ray,

I apologize for your frustration. I have used the XGate extensively and have attached a Codewarrior project that uses the SCI for interrupt driven, buffered I/O. It is set up for Xon/XOff handshaking, so if this is not desired in your application you will need to modify the code. But the example works as is, though you will need to change the following constants in main() to match your hardware:

#define XTALFrequency 10000000

#define ReferenceClock 2000000

and

#define EClockFrequency 48000000

in GlobalsShared.h

Regards,

Gordon

[rayhall]

Gordon,

Thank you for the code. I will study/try it over the next day or so.

Ray.