Need some advice on chip selection

[blewisjr]

If that does not work I guess I will have to do things the old fashion way with good old vim + terminal + makefile.

The issue isn't the IDE or any tools you use. This (reading and understanding the manuals and datasheet) is a way of life here. Some tools may make it easier for you but no relieve you of reading, lots of readings.

No other way around it.

Never said I was trying to eliminate reading and lots of reading but I can't learn by just reading.  Personally I need something practical so I can focus my reading because all of the material is just reference material in these PDF's.  If I don't have a simple project going like light a LED I have no way to even know where to start reading.  The task of light a led (note not blink the led) focus' my reading on GPIO.  With that in mind I was able to find the relevant information on configuring GPIO in the documentation.  The example program given by ST helped me find the header files to look into etc...  It is just do difficult to sit there and read through a reference manual + datasheet without some kind of goal in mind.  That is just me though.  Oh and yes I did already read the chips data sheet 3 times and can't remember a damn thing lol.  Most of a bulk was electrical characteristics and architecture block diagrams.

Also I do not expect the tools to do all the work never do as most of the time tools screw up anyway.  I was just hoping to see a basic template there for the eval board I have.  It is not there so I will have to figure out an alternative way and hopefully be able to figure out how to save it as a template to use again later.  It is no big deal it is just easier if you can click a few buttons and have your project ready to go and make your tweaks;  instead of having to do all of the steps of setting it up each time you make a new project.

[dannyf]

Never said I was trying to eliminate reading and lots of reading

The point is that you have to understand the chip, libraries and the tools for you to work comfortably with them. That requires tons of reading.

Or your experience will be painful.

If I don't have a simple project going like light a LED

It is very easy to blink an led - as long as you take a methodical approach. See what I wrote earlier about it.

Most of a bulk was electrical characteristics and architecture block diagrams.

Read the reference manual.

I was just hoping to see a basic template there for the eval board I have. 

CoIDE sets up a minimalist template for you and it can be compiled within seconds - that is the beauty of CoIDE -> create a new project, select the chip, pick the components -> hit build and you are done.

After that, you will need to drop in your own stuff in main.c to make it do whatever you want. There are tons of examples within the ide and online too.

You just need to understand the tool to take advantage of it.

[blewisjr]

Well that was simple I was able to get a LED to blink using a simple software delay.  I know I am kind of derailing my own thread but there was something I noticed about CoIDE.  When you create a Project it actually places quite a few files directly into the workspace folder.  This is really weird considering eclipse which this is based off of places each project in its own folder under the workspace.  Does this mean with CoIDE you can only have one project per workspace and thus only one project open at a given time?
I also noticed the linker script seems to be modified on the fly and it is not actually stored in the workspace.  This seems like a VCS nightmare waiting to happen.

Any ideas I can't find anything in the IDE docs about this stuff nor on the CoIDE forums.

[dannyf]

I was able to get a LED to blink using a simple software delay.

Getting a led to blink is very easy. The difficult part is to figure out your way to code / work around the environment so you can maximize return on your (coding) investment. For example, you can make your libraries out of the exercise so in the future you can reuse them.

When you create a Project it actually places quite a few files directly into the workspace folder. 

Those are the library files. Basically, there are two ways to do this:

1) you can configure the library via a configuration file (placed in the project directory) and the interrupt files (customized for your project);
2) or you copy the whole structure into the project directory.

I tend to customize my library files and use a middle layer to access the library calls. Because of that, the CoIDE approach works well for me. Otherwise, I rely on a template to structure my "typical" project settings and copy them to the new project folder to speed up the development process.

This is where CoIDE speeds up the whole thing for me.

DSPLib isn't done the same way as it doesn't require configuration.

Does this mean with CoIDE you can only have one project per workspace and thus only one project open at a given time?

You are correct. workspace doesn't work in CoIDE - they are a few others and you will find them out soon,