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MSP430 LaunchPad

hobby electronics, msp430

I have a number of electronics kits and boards like Netduino, Arduino and Gadgeteer. Among all the cheapest one I’ve ever seen is Texas Instrument’s MSP430 LaunchPad. Last year I bough one of these just because it was so cheap but couldn’t spend much time on it. I recently found out it has dropped to £8 and I decided to buy the latest version. Now that I have 2 of these babies I definitely need to spend some time to play with them.

MSP 430

Looks like there are a few differences between the two. The one on the left in the picture above is the old version. The new version comes with better controllers and male pins on the side.

Installation

First thing to do is go to its official site and download Code Composer Studio to develop programs to run on it. It is an Eclipse-based IDE so I’m hoping it won’t take to long to get acquainted with it.

First Program

Good thing there are plenty of tutorials about it. I decided to follow one of the simplest ones which just blinks one of the on-board LEDs. To be honest, the code looks hideous:

unsigned int i = 0; 
void main(void)
{
  WDTCTL = WDTPW + WDTHOLD;     
  P1DIR |= 0x01;

  for (;;)
  {
    P1OUT ^= 0x01;
    for(i=0; i< 20000; i++);
  }
}

I deleted the comments to keep it short. But even with detailed comments it looks hard to develop complex applications with this. Anyway, I’ll see how far I can get with it. So far, for this amound of work, the results are not so bad.

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