When I tried to start working on the TM4C1294 project, I assumed the setup would be simple—just plug in the board and debug from Code Composer Studio. But the very first time I clicked on Test Connection, I got hit with this error:
SC_ERR_XDS110_OPEN – An attempt to connect to the XDS110 failed.

This basically means: your computer couldn’t talk to the onboard debugger (XDS110) over USB. So the microcontroller couldn’t be programmed or debugged.

At first, I thought okay, this might just be the USB cable, which is what everyone says is the first thing to check. But my board was lighting up fine the moment I plugged it in, so it was clearly getting power. That meant the USB cable wasn’t the issue.

Then I checked whether I had selected the correct device and debugger. I had chosen TM4C1294NCPDT as the device (this is the exact microcontroller chip on my board), and the connection type was set to Texas Instruments XDS110 USB Debug Probe (which is the onboard USB debugger used to load and run code on the chip). Everything seemed right.

So I clicked Test Connection again—same error. No improvement.

Then I thought maybe the debugger firmware needed to be reset or updated. So I tried using the command-line tool that TI provides called xdsdfu. I ran the command xdsdfu -e — this is supposed to list any XDS110 debugger that is connected. But… nothing showed up. The tool couldn’t even find the debugger. So basically, my system wasn’t detecting the XDS110 hardware at all.

After that, I opened Device Manager (Windows tool that shows all hardware devices connected to your system). I checked if anything new was showing up when I plugged in the board. Still, no errors, no yellow warning icons. Everything seemed normal on the surface.

So now I was like, what is going on?

I then opened the CCS installation directory and navigated to:
C:\ti\ccs\ccs_base\common\uscif\xds110

This folder is where all the driver files for the XDS110 debugger are supposed to be installed. But when I opened that folder—it was empty. Or close to empty. That was suspicious. Maybe the XDS110 drivers hadn’t installed properly. That would explain why even the xdsdfu tool wasn’t working and why the debugger couldn’t be detected.

At this point, I knew it wasn’t just one thing.

• The USB cable was fine (board was lighting up).
• The debugger and chip settings in CCS were correct.
• Device Manager wasn’t showing any connection issues.
• But xdsdfu showed nothing, and the XDS driver folder was nearly empty.

So currently, I’m stuck here. I’m thinking of completely uninstalling and reinstalling CCS, or maybe even trying it out on a fresh laptop just to see if it works there. Either that, or manually downloading and adding the missing XDS drivers.

Sometimes you think the hardest part of a project will be the logic or the code—but no, it’s actually just getting the debugger to talk to your board. Once I fix this, I’ll update this post.