What a bunch of crap…

To many hoops to jump through…

Only 10 designs possible, I guess if you make it past the final phase it might be worth it, but why bother…

There are better ways to waste our neurons… beer anyone…..

Well said Chango. I think Freescale should jump through hoops to attract customers, not the other way around.

well, Freescale has low cost tools as weel. Just a few weeks ago I bought a Cortex-M4 kit at the freescale store for $29. it has lcd display, touch buttons, audio output, mic, plus some other stuff I dont use, and its onboard JTAG can be used with other target boards or prototypes you build. I think its a good deal, I dont know of any other Cortex-M4 board at such price. (exept maybe the coupon for the eval bot from TI XD)

I think the “exclusivity” was setup to weed out the typical hacker. Freescale’s marketing is squarely aimed at the corporate designer of high volume products.

Design something that makes sense in mass production if you enter this contest.

It might be a good project for a group of friends to enter so they can tackle a more complex project.

Freescale does do some nice things sometimes. I went to a local seminar last fall about their Kinetis chips, and they gave all attendees a free Tower dev board, which is a really nice piece of kit. Unfortunately, they don’t have a reasonable compiler that’s not 30-day limited, so the best you can do as a hobbyist is to use the 32Kb-limited IAR compiler — and then you can’t compile anything that uses Ethernet, because the projects are invariably 33Kb >:(

Also, as a development platform, it’s really nice but it’s almost overbuilt. There are half a dozen jumpers that have to be set right to enable/disable various functional units, and these are only documented (sometimes halfway, or incorrectly) in readme.txt files in the project directory. Finding any sort of cohesive documentation on what has to be set is amazingly difficult, so you end up back at the schematics – but for some tower modules there aren’t even schematics available (I’m looking at you, TOW-SER) so who knows? Sigh… it’s a really neat kit and I wish I had something to do with it, but I just can’t.

TI has figured it out, the Stellaris boards (including the Evalbot) ship with a board-locked version of their full compiler, so you don’t have to deal with that 30-day nonsense (honestly, who has ever gotten use out of a 30-day trial? Especially as a hobbyist… you put a project down for a week or two, as can often happen, and suddenly you no longer have a working compiler, so the whole thing is rubbish. Ugh.) Now if they could only unify their IDEs so I no longer need three separate versions of CCS installed… oh well, at least it’s not EW.

@chango, obviously I understand you couldn’t enter your work-design. That wasn’t my point. You’re the kind of guy Freescale wants to attract (and obviously has). Ideally the guy like you currently familiar with another vendor’s parts and whose dept budget can easily support $3500 tools.

I also design products although they’re never built in volumes higher than thousands or maybe tens of thousands of units. Freescale isn’t interested in me as evidenced by the cost of developing firmware for their chips.

That’s fine. They get to define their market strategy. ST is the same way (too bad for me because I like their parts).

The only thing it has going for it is that they don’t own your design after you submit it (Which a few other sleazy chipmakers do for contests. Read the fine print)

Otherwise its a complete travesty. You have to complete “online training” and pass a quiz before you can even enter! And if you’re one of the chosen you ‘get’ “the opportunity to select from discounted tools and create [your] own unique design” which means you still have to pay for the tools to make it. (Though you get a discount.)

Contests like this are to get MORE people interested in your product, get MORE users and create a positive buzz about your product. This contest not only crates negative buzz, but eliminates from the competition anyone who doesn’t already have experience with the platform. What a stupid way to waste of $20K of their marketing budget.

It’s also only for Americans..

thanks guys, I’ve just ordered an MSP430 kit, I’m so freakin excited! I’m a no to low budget hobbyist and $4.30 is in the just right price range.

lol
most people commenting sound like babies crying over not getting a free candy.
I guess the quiz is just to filter out sample colectors

BTW. I’m prety sure you can use Freescale kinetis boards with the free gcc based Sourcery CodeBench lite version. Although I can’t confirm because I have an academic license.

Freescale did something similar a while ago for one of their hc08 product lines IIRC, you had to pass an online quiz and then complete a coding example (via online test system) before you qualified to receive free or discounted development system use for the final phases of the contest.

I rather enjoyed it, actually. The “hoops” were not difficult, and I actually learned some things. Certainly more than when I order a development kit for a contest and never actually getting around to doing anything with it, which is all common…

Marketing for these companies is totally out of touch with the developer community. To start with , the time frame they have allotted is ridiculous. Play along with the contest and have a final design by august? Are you nuts ? As a developer we have other things in life besides working 24/7 on hardware and giving just over 30 days to get the hardware, learn its quirks , and make a product is silly.

Then we are supposed to submit a design paper in which we release all rights to the work to freescale for their further use even if we do not win is again silly.

The benefit to the developer is a limited trial of a toolchain ? hello ? Anyone home at marketing ?

Companies need to learn that charging for development software, making us perform like your trained pets just to get a pat on the head, and over charging for development hardware is NOT the way to make developers want to use your products.

some companies have learned like Atmel and Microchip by offering low cost hardware and free software, but the others like freescale and TI that want thousands for a $50 hardware board need to wake up. I am not supposed to be paying you a premium for the privilege of using your stuff.

(stupid not-my-keyboard…) I don’t think that manufacturers quite understand how thin the line is between a hobbyist and a real designer when it comes to evaluating new technologies. the times when an engineer is given a couple months to read datasheets and play with evaluation boards to pick a NEW architecture are few and far between. You have to capture “mindshare” from an engineer’s spare time…

On the other hand, I doubt that big companies doing real evaluations for significant products. would have trouble getting any of the development boards we’re looking at here for free. Or that they’d consider several thousand spent on development systems to be an inappropriate expense.

these contests are a way for a manufacturer to get “showcase” projects from engineers who are showing off their talents or their “hobbyist” prjoects. Don’t think that contests are a significant part of the marketing effort behind … anything (for example, compare total prize value to the travel expenses for manning a booth at ONE trade show…)