Have you heard about TI's MSP430-based LaunchPad?
You can buy them from (prices and availability may change depending on time and shipping address):
- TI directly for $10 USD
- Amazon.com for $14.95 USD
I'm a huge fan. I had to use the MSP430 architecture for a project recently and it was a blast. It's such a low-powered micro that you can put it to sleep for ten years on a single AA battery. That's nuts.
My intent with this repository is to offer some code to help get started with some of the on-board peripherals and provide an example for some off-board peripherals accessed through SPI or GPIO. There are a couple of directions I may take this repository:
- A camera that I can attach to a kite and take aerial snapshots around my house.
- A front-end to a PCB UV curing box.
- An 802.15.4-enabled sensor device.
Currently none. I will update this area as support is added for a peripheral.
I'm attempting to write this code in a TDD fashion. If you're unfamiliar with embedded TDD (or are otherwise curious about it), I cannot recommend Test Driven Development for Embedded C by James W. Grenning highly enough. Some of the tools he used in that book have evolved slightly, but the theory is very sound.
Additionally the comments are done in the style of Doxygen, so if you have it installed you can invoke it with:
doxygen doxygen.config
The output will be in docs/doxygen. Due to the fact that the project is entirely in C you'll get the most bang for your buck under the Files section.
You will need:
- GCC (all tests are compiled with your host architecture)
- MSP430 environment for your OS
- osx-launchpad for Mac
- MSPGCC and MSPDebug for Linux
- Code Composer Studio 5.3 for Windows
Once you get everything installed, you can run the tests by command line with the following command:
mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make && ./test/basic/runBasicTests
Feel free to drop me a line. I'll respond if you don't get caught in my spam filter.