Hi All
Some of you may know I am an enthusiast of the MSP430 - as a result of it's no nonsense, clean orthogonal 16-bit architecture, low power operation and a useful set of peripherals.
I have programmed MSP430 both in assembly and C - however when it comes to programming the most recent MSP430FRxxxx Launchpad development boards, code development has previously been hampered by lack of a friendly toolchain, only TI Code Composer.
I was pleased today, to see that the latest release of Energia (the MSP430 version of an Arduino like IDE) - now supports the newer MSP430 FRAM dev boards.
As a test, having downloaded Energia and plugged in the MSP430FR2433 Launchpad, the board was detected, the firmware for the "mspdebug" programmer was automatically updated and very soon I had blinky running. (just 930 bytes of code to flash an LED!!!).
I then plugged in my latest MSP430FR5994 Launchpad, - again a firmware update for the programming device, and then quickly had the same Blinky program running on the '5994.
This opens up these newer MSP430 boards to an open-source IDE - with all the quickness and convenience of the Arduino environment - without having to resort to the rather cumbersome "Code Composer" - the official toolchain from TI.
You can download Energia from here:
https://energia.nu/BTW - I think 930 bytes of code to flash an LED is an insult to anyone who can program a microcontroller from scratch in assembly language. However it's better than the 22K bytes I needed to flash an LED on a recent ARM processor!
For those that like a challenge - I think that 1024 bytes is enough to program an interactive "Forth Like" shell on the MSP430.
The MSP430FR5994 Launchpad costs less than £20, you get 256Kbytes of FRAM and an SDCard - ideal for very low power datalogging.
regards
Ken
