Is the wizard as brain damaged as it seems?

[dbotkin]

I just upgraded to 4.116 from 4.099. I did no mostly to pick up support for a number of new chips that I want to be able to use, like the 12F1822.

The old project wizard would often create a .h file with numerous errors in the list of #fuse statements, requiring manual editing to insert linefeeds where they were needed. It was annoying, but not fatal. And the PWM setup left a lot to be desired, but again -- annoying but not fatal.

The new version fails completely when attempting to create a project with either of the chips I tried today, the 12F1822 and the 18F14K50. In each case the wizard created no files at all -- no .pjt, no .c, no .h. In the case of the 12F1822 I got an error message as soon as I selected the chip.

Is anyone else seeing problems this severe, or do I have something wrong with my installation? Or does no one really care whether the project wizard works or not? It seems to have gotten less functional each time I upgrade. And yes, I did email CCS support about these problems, I am just wondering if they're my problems or the compiler's.

[scottc]

Hello I tested ver 4.116 selecting the 18F14K50 in the wizard and
the wizard was able to create a program for blinking a led on and off.

So I believe the wizard is functional.

You might want to verify the following.

Click Options then project options.
Click on Include Files.

Verify that your compiler Devices and drivers folder are "pointed to"
the folder the compiler is installed to.

in the window you should see

c:\Program Files\PICC\Devices
c:\Program Files\PICC\Drivers

The compiler needs to know where to look so as to include the various
headder files for a device or specific driver.

Thanks Scott

[dbotkin]

Options are fine -- I've been using the compiler and the wizard for several years now, and I have used the wizard up until recently to create projects using older chip, like for instance the 18F4620 or 18F26K50. It's interesting that you can create a project with that chip selected, though. I just tried one of the older chips that has worked fine up until now (18F4620) and it failed to create any files. I think I may just uninstall everything and re-install from scratch... maybe there's a damaged or downlevel DLL file or something.

[scottc]

A re-install might fix the problem but one other thing comes to mind.

Its possible that the folder your creating the project in is damaged.

Try create a new folder first using Explorer, then run the wizard and
point it to that folder as the place to create the files.

Thanks Scott

[dbotkin]

The folder was fine. The compiler had apparently been hit in the head with a brick at some point. I removed the software completely, then downloaded and re-installed the compiler, IDE, IDE utilities, CCSload, etc. What I have tried so far appears to work now, other than a few oddball errors in the .h and .c files. It's not perfect, but it's much better. In fact, it looks completely different than it did before -- I'm wondering if there were fragments of an even older still hanging around.

Now to see if it will cleanly re-compile my old projects... I'm glad I made a complete backup before starting this. Think I'll make another one of my projects just to be safe. :)

[gpsmikey]

The key to good backups is learning to do them BEFORE you have managed to scramble something

mikey
_________________
mikey
-- you can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !
old engineering saying: 1+1 = 3 for sufficiently large values of 1 or small values of 3

[dbotkin]

Yeah, I learned that a while back. :) Now I tend to get a little paranoid, if one backup is good then three is even better.

The wizard is working now, pretty much. It's spitting out some erroneous stuff, but nothing that's a huge problem right now. Still, I can't trust the #fuse statements and have to manually check each one, which is a PITA. It's chip-specific stuff. The irritating part is, some of the device .h files have changed so stuff blows up with no clues as to what they changed or why. 18F26J50 is one, several #fuse statements I was using before are now causing errors. They also changed time_t to rtc_time_t, a few other little things. it would be nice if this kind of stuff were documented somewhere, but I'm not seeing it. Oh well. At least my OLD projects (12F683 and 16F648A based stuff) still compiler as they did before.

[LostInSpace]

>>>it would be nice if this kind of stuff were documented somewhere, but I'm not seeing it.

I have been using this product since 1994 (BBS Days then) - Everyone since, has asked for this - it hasn't happened yet - it's a safe bet it won't ever happen. Also intermediate releases that go "Backwards" aren't ever going away - on the plus side when I have had a few real issues with broken stuff they fixed them within a day for me.

Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs.... and I'm still using the product.... Happily I might add...

:-)

Steve H.
_________________
HTH - Steve H.