First of all, I apologize for the late night rant, but it sure felt good, ha ha. Your assessment of my needs are correct. Hardware is already in production and in the field. MSP430F169 , so changing is not doable. This is a pretty old device so it not being perfect in 2016 is somewhat excusable. I followed the protocols in slaa089a.pdf (TI names their documents like this...why? Ha ha. Do you know what my folder of TI documents looks like? Alphabet soup). I went with instructing the application over the UART to enter the BSL, but first erasing the interrupt vector table. This appears to function and meet my needs, but is a bit of a hack. My frustration is with what appears to be TI specifically engineering the part to make a common need very difficult to accomplish (and newer ones are only getting worse it appears). Need = Hassle free in field upgrades while retaining important non-volatile data settings. I find it impossible to believe this is an edge case for TI's customers. There are just so many ways around this. 1. Optionally turn off password protection for flash access. 2. Move the password to somewhere other than the IVT. 3. Allow the compiler to randomize the password, or not. 4. Allow a user definable password. 5. Why put all this security and inconvenience on the BSL when I can just stick a JTAG programmer on it anyway? 6. Allow the INFO sector to be selectively protected during a mass erase, just like JTAG does. Make it a compile time option. 7. Why, oh why, did TI change the BSL protocols so often and for seemingly unfathomable reasons? 8. Why can't I enter the BSL from code and retain my UART pinout settings? 9. Why is there so little sample code for writing a PC based bootloader host? I found some, but it only supported a very small subset of parts. I'm aware some of these improvements are already in place in newer devices. I think the main message is that TI needs to become a better software company. It really matters. My experience with other companies that provide free Visual Studio based IDE's, extension API support, etc. makes using MSP's while paying for IAR compilers difficult to justify going forward. TI can do better. I have always been a big fan of these processors.
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