Running HALCoGen on Mac or Linux With WINE
By Richard
- 3 minutes read - 539 words
This tutorial covers installing and running HALCoGen for TI Hercules/TMS570 MCUs on a mac or Linux machine using WINE. I first started using HALCoGen for the SFU Satellite Design Team, where we’re developing an onboard computer using the TI Hercules/TMS570 microcontrollers. These are really interesting industrial lockstep MCUs, with ECC memory and all kinds of neat reliability features.
WINE is a layer that translates Windows API calls to POSIX calls, which are used on macOS, Linux, etc. It’s free, and quite easy to set up.
Step 1: Get HALCoGen
Download HALCoGen from the TI site here.
Step 2: Get WINE
Download WINE for your system, and any dependencies you may require. I downloaded the “staging” binary package of WINE from here.
I also needed XQuartz, and be sure to download from the XQuartz.org site here, not something like “xquartz.soft32.com,” which came up in the Google search but tries to install a bunch of garbage.
Step 3: Install WINE
Open up and install the WINE package.
Step 4: Install HALCoGEN With WINE
Unzip the HALCoGen installer. Something along the lines of “HALCoGen-04.06.00-installer.exe” should appear.
Launch the WINE application, it will bring up a terminal. Now you need to cd to the directory that has the HALCoGen installer you downloaded in step 1.
For me, this looked like: cd Desktop
Now, run WINE on the installer by typing wine HALCoGen-04.06.00-installer.exe (but replace with the full name of your particular HALCoGen installer). Note: the WINE terminal will autocomplete with the tab key.
WINE may ask you to automatically install a few things. It installed .NET and Gecko after detecting that they weren’t on my system.
Important: select your installation directory
Selecting installation directory
In the installer, be sure to select your installation directory correctly by clicking the folder icon. Since things are being translated, the old windows-style defaults location won’t work.
Keep moving through the installer, clicking “yes” to any dependencies WINE wants to install, and the process should go smoothly!
Step 5: Run HALCoGen
Now that your installation has succeeded, it’s time to exit the installer and launch WINE again. When it comes up, cd to the directory with your HALCoGen.exe file in it.
For me, I had to go back out of my desktop and into my ti directory, so this looked like: cd ../ti
You can use ls to list the files in the directory to see if the HALCoGen executable is there. If it is, you’re in the right place.
Now type: wine HALCOGEN.exe Note: it doesn’t need to be capitalized, and the tab key will autocomplete.
Step 6: You’re done!
HALCoGEN on Mac
Hopefully HALCoGen has popped up and is working! If it does, you’re good to go! I have confirmed that HALCoGen can correctly generate code from an existing project file, so it seems to work quite well under WINE. To launch HALCoGen in the future, just open up WINE, cd to the directory with HALCOGEN.exe, and type wine HALCOGEN.exe.
Now consider installing Code Composer Studio for mac or Linux to get a full TMS570/Hercules toolchain going on your system of choice.
Step 7: Other Apps
I’ve successfully used this procedure with other TI installers for packages such as the flash driver and the safety library.