Cyan Flash of Death Killer

@timb nice! :slight_smile: So it has a bootloader attached to I2C? Can the timeout also be reprogrammed via I2C? Just looked, those ARE cheap… I’m guessing you’ve been messing with MSP430 for a while if you just whipped this up. I have a bunch of MSP430 stuff, but I never really got into it because the IDE was so crappy. Maybe you could point me in the right direction for Dev tools. I have a bunch of TI MSP430 lauchpad stuff, capacitive touch shield, the MSP430 watch, and Stellaris eval bot :wink:

Yeah, I can setup the timeout for I2C programming. Yup, the bootloader works over I2C, check the Battery Shield thread (a few posts above your latest) to see some info.

Yeah, the MSP430 has been my MCU of choice for quite awhile. You can buy a DIP based Launchpad for $10 direct from TI, which beats the shit out of Arduino Uno. Now TI has the F5529 Launchpad, which is like like an Arduino Mega on steroids; runs at 25MHz, has built in USB with HID and mass storage support! (The demo that ships on the board has you plug it in to your computer where it enumerates as a flash drive, you open it open and there’s some text files and a programming manual in PDF. The two text files contain some demo text that you can edit, now here’s the cool part, each text file corresponds to one of the two buttons on the Launchpad, when you press the first button the launchpad will TYPE the text from the first file via a HID keyboard device!) This board is around $12 and has double the I/O of the original Launchpad, over 64KB of flash, lots of ram.

Now, on to IDEs! There’s a project that extends Arduino to the MSP430 and Tiva C lines called Energia (named after the Russian space shuttle). The latest version uses (has built-in) the TI/Red Hat version of GCC for MSP430 and the ARM Toolchain. They’ve literally taken the Arduino UI, changed some colors and wrapped Wiring around the TI provided MSP430/Tiva C system files. It works great and there’s a very active community surrounding it over at 43oh. Energia is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

Personally, I need a more powerful IDE than Arduino, but find the abstraction of Wiring very handy for quick projects, so I use something called embedXcode which provides Arduino, Energia, chipKit, Maple, Teensy, Maple, Digispark and Microduino support for Xcode. You just need to have the relevant application installed on your system (Energia and Arduino to support those platforms, for example) since they contain a command line compiler and flasher, embedXcode can use them to build and flash your code right from Apple’s Xcode!

For Windows users, I know there’s something similar for Visual Studio. I also know that TI’s Code Composer Studio 6 now supports building Energia projects, so that might be another option (though I hate CCS with a passion).

You can also download the older mspgcc or the newer Red Hat GCC for MSP430 (or extract it from Energia) and compile right from the command line if you’re so inclined.

Let me know if you need help getting any of this setup. :smile:

By the way, if you ever want to get rid of that MSP430 watch, let me know. I’d love to have it for testing out that sensor project I mentioned to you awhile back! :wink:

2 Likes