Reply by "lex...@gmail.com [msp430]"●September 6, 20142014-09-06
You have missed the point. The MSP430 is not for teaching how to use
microcontrollers, the point is for engineers to develop products that take
advantage of the ultra low power consumption, stability and flexibility.
If you want to learn Arduino, feel free, but no one is ever building one into
anything that is designed for mass production. For that, you need the chip to be
small, reliable, cheap, flexible, and based on a set of professional development
tools and debugging capabilities.
Reply by msp4...@yahoogroups.com●September 5, 20142014-09-05
Reply by "Reg...@yahoo.com [msp430]"●September 5, 20142014-09-05
I think the OP was grumbling about his perceived state of MSP430 support on the
Mac. For non-Windows users MSP430 (and ARM) support has been somewhat
unsatisfactory until lately. It's still a bit of a challenge to locate all
the resources available. The web gets out of date quickly. For the 430 this is
made more difficult by some gcc for 430 efforts which have been abandoned and
TI's decision to put more resources into support for gcc for the MSP430.
I'm confused myself about what to use on Linux. But at the moment I'm
playing w/ ARM based boards, so I've not been concerned. A Usenet style
monthly FAQ posting about MSP430 toolchain support would certainly be helpful to
non-Windows users.
As was pointed out previously, Energia provides an Arduino style programming
environment on Unix (at least the Linux and Mac flavors). There's also the
traditional compile-link-load command line interface using mspgcc, mspdebug and
gdb. In addition, there is Matthias Koch's excellent Mecrisp which
provides a standalone forth environment for both MSP430 and ARM devices. A
couple of years ago the toolset was sufficiently poor that I gave up for a
while. I wanted to play, but not enough to use Windows. I did give up on
Solaris though. I got the 430 gcc toolchain working. But for ARM that was a
bridge too far, so I built a dedicated CentOS box for MCU work.
As to the OP's question about why the instructor chose the MSP430 there are
many possible reasons. Exposure to YAM (yet another MCU) is certainly a good
reason. It might also be personal experience (the instructor may not have time
to learn a processor just to teach a course) or resources provided by TI. Just
in the limited stuff I've done I've encountered the "I can't use
that device because it doesn't have xxx." I suggest that the OP ask the
instructor and report back. Since he reported being familiar w/ the Arduino, it
would be interesting to hear how he thinks Energia stacks up in comparison. The
limited foray I made w/ Energia and the G2553 & F5529 LaunchPads made a good
impression on me once I fixed a few minor issues. But I don't have any
Arduino experience.
Back in the '90's we had the workstation wars. Now we have the dev
board wars. May the battles continue. ;-)
Have Fun!
Reg
Posted by: Reginald Beardsley
Reply by "pkj...@yahoo.com [msp430]"●September 5, 20142014-09-05
If the IDE seems daunting, then for initial learning purposes wouldn't
GRACE be a good place to start?
Grace – Graphical Peripheral Configuration Tool - GRACE - TI Software
Folder http://www.ti.com/tool/GRACE
Grace – Graphical Peripheral Configuration Tool - GRACE...
http://www.ti.com/tool/GRACE For more information, visit the Grace Wiki - Fully
harness MSP430 MCUs integrated analog and digital peripherals with Grace
Software Enable and configure ADCs,...
As far as MAC vs PC for development IDE platform. Macs are for graphic artists,
videographers and Photoshop pros. PCs are for people that have real work to do
(Windows or Linux). Windows just happens to have a larger following. That's
just life as we know it. :^)
Reply by "Ale...@yahoo.com [msp430]"●September 4, 20142014-09-04
Arduino RAM and Flash ROM footprint is a big issue when you're designing
fast applications, if you're thinking in professional applicatons then you
need to write your code in C or in native machine code (even if you want to use
atmel microcontrollers).
Arduino is a good tool to build concept tests, but it is not adequate to
professional solutions.. ok.. that's my point of view...
On Thursday, September 4, 2014 1:06 PM, "John Porubek j...@gmail.com [msp430]"
wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 10:40 AM, k...@gmail.com [msp430] wrote: >I think this is very fascinating. I am just starting a
class which uses the MSP430 (Physics 324 - Instrumental/Computer Interfacing)
and was wondering why we are learning this microcontroller over the Arduino.
>I use a Mac, and I have been exposed to the various projects (hardware and
software) on the Arduino platform, so I would have liked to use that instead.
Just as the Arduino is easy to learn and make modular as a hardware platform,
the MSP430 is powerful in being low-power and useful as an
educational/demonstration tool for showing how a microcontroller works.
>However, I'm also wondering if someone has not already tried to make the
MSP430 more like the Arduino in the sense of making it more general purpose,
i.e.: masking the hardware complexities and removing the reliance on the
Windows-based IDE.
>
>Is there anything in particular about the MSP430 which would make this
impossible? I am just barely scraping the surface of the MSP430, but as a
Computer Science major, I imagine that it might be as simple ("simple" used very
loosely) as extending the TI C++ libraries and headers in order to extend
functionality.
Sounds like you're talking about something like Energia (
http://energia.nu/ ). From the website:
"Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform started by
Robert Wessels in January of 2012 with the goal to bring the Wiring and
Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad."
Reply by "jos...@gmail.com [msp430]"●September 4, 20142014-09-04
KFalconer
Take a look at Energia: http://energia.nu
Cheers
J.I.Serafini
2014-09-04 11:40 GMT-03:00 k...@gmail.com [msp430] <
m...>: > I think this is very fascinating. I am just starting
a class which uses
> the MSP430 (Physics 324 - Instrumental/Computer Interfacing) and was
> wondering why we are learning this microcontroller over the Arduino.
>
> I use a Mac, and I have been exposed to the various projects (hardware and
> software) on the Arduino platform, so I would have liked to use that
> instead. Just as the Arduino is easy to learn and make modular as a
> hardware platform, the MSP430 is powerful in being low-power and useful as
> an educational/demonstration tool for showing how a microcontroller works.
>
> However, I'm also wondering if someone has not already tried to make
the
> MSP430 more like the Arduino in the sense of making it more general
> purpose, i.e.: masking the hardware complexities and
removing the reliance
> on the Windows-based IDE.
>
> Is there anything in particular about the MSP430 which would make this
> impossible? I am just barely scraping the surface of the MSP430, but as a
> Computer Science major, I imagine that it might be as simple ("simple" used
> very loosely) as extending the TI C++ libraries and headers in order to
> extend functionality.
>
>
>
Reply by "Joh...@gmail.com [msp430]"●September 4, 20142014-09-04
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 10:40 AM, k...@gmail.com [msp430] <
m...> wrote:
>
> I think this is very fascinating. I am just starting a class which uses
> the MSP430 (Physics 324 - Instrumental/Computer Interfacing) and was
> wondering why we are learning this microcontroller over the Arduino.
>
> I use a Mac, and I have been exposed to the various projects (hardware and
> software) on the Arduino platform, so I would have liked to use that
> instead. Just as the Arduino is easy to learn and make modular as a
> hardware platform, the MSP430 is powerful in being low-power and useful as
> an educational/demonstration tool for showing how a microcontroller works.
>
> However, I'm also wondering if someone has not already tried to make
the
> MSP430 more like the Arduino in the sense of making it more general
> purpose, i.e.: masking the hardware complexities and removing the reliance
> on the Windows-based IDE.
>
> Is there anything in particular about the MSP430 which would make this
> impossible? I am just barely scraping the surface of the MSP430, but as a
> Computer Science major, I imagine that it might be as simple ("simple" used
> very loosely) as extending the TI C++ libraries and headers in order to
> extend functionality.
>
Sounds like you're talking about something like Energia (
http://energia.nu/
). From the website:
"Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform started by
Robert Wessels in January of 2012 with the goal to bring the Wiring and
Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad."
Reply by "kfa...@gmail.com [msp430]"●September 4, 20142014-09-04
I think this is very fascinating. I am just starting a class which uses the
MSP430 (Physics 324 - Instrumental/Computer Interfacing) and was wondering why
we are learning this microcontroller over the Arduino.
I use a Mac, and I have been exposed to the various projects (hardware and
software) on the Arduino platform, so I would have liked to use that instead.
Just as the Arduino is easy to learn and make modular as a hardware platform,
the MSP430 is powerful in being low-power and useful as an
educational/demonstration tool for showing how a microcontroller works.
However, I'm also wondering if someone has not already tried to make the
MSP430 more like the Arduino in the sense of making it more general purpose,
i.e.: masking the hardware complexities and removing the reliance on the
Windows-based IDE.
Is there anything in particular about the MSP430 which would make this
impossible? I am just barely scraping the surface of the MSP430, but as a
Computer Science major, I imagine that it might be as simple ("simple" used very
loosely) as extending the TI C++ libraries and headers in order to extend
functionality.
Reply by William Sell●March 23, 20142014-03-23
I just did a project using the Arduino Uno My take on this
hardware/development environment is it is geared to folks who wished to be
shielded from the details of the hardware; basically programming for
non-technical people. Too limiting for me, the only debugging option was
printing out of serial port. No breakpoints, no call stack, no register
inspection, no memory view etc. I actually enjoyed using it, but would
never consider this as something to use in a complex design.
