TI evaluation board GUI

[woody]

I have a proof of concept project where I need to control a low-voltage DC motor. For speed I decided to use an off the shelf driver, the TI DRV8411. Where I would normally design this (SMD) component directly on a PCB I saw TI had a nice evaluation board available with all the pins broken out so I thought, handy, and ordered it.

It was swiftly delivered and came with a leaflet that let me know there is a GUI available that lets me play with the thing. Well, in for a penny...  so I downloaded and ran the (25k) GUI installer.

During installation it informed me it needed to install the GUI Composer Runtime. OK, whatever you want, go do it. That install took nearly 10 minutes. After which I ended up with 34.538 files in 3.277 folders, taking a total of 1.32 GB (1.422.913.711 bytes) disk space.  And all that this does is show me a simple window from which I am able to send a couple of basic commands to the evaluation board. Think start/stop, direction.

Am I the only one who thinks something has gone off the rails here? How difficult can it be to send some bytes over a serial connection from a window with a couple of buttons? You really need 1.3GB for that?

Anyway, the breakout part works fine and the GUI can be uninstalled, so who am I to complain

[tom66]

It's a bit insane but you've probably found the programmer who designed that took no attention into what dependencies they actually needed.  For the record for a basic Python GUI compiled to an EXE using py2exe, I've been able to get into the 10MB range which includes the embedded Python 3 interpreter, all Tkinter libraries, and the program itself.  If you want to go bare to the metal then you can get below that using things like MFC on Windows but... it's so hard to develop in that for anything modern I'd not recommend it.