MSP430 Toolbox
The MSP430 ToolBox is a set of programs designed for Texas Instrument's MSP430 Launchpad. The toolbox turns turns your 5$ Launchpad into a primitive (yet useful)
toolbox for MCU and electronics development. The design goal is simple: Utilize the Launchpad IC's with the fewest possible extras.
The toolbox consists an MSP430 firmware and a number of PC applications. Currently there is an PC application written in C# (should run on both Linux and Windows), which allows easy usage of the MSP430 Toolbox. The communication between the MSP430-chip and the PC is USB/UART. The UART/USB converter on the Launchpad can be used, but an FTDI-chip is recommended as it allows for higher transfer speeds.
There are two measurement modes: Streaming and high-frequency. In Streaming mode the sample rate is as fast as the UART/USB combination allows. Using an FTDI chip this allows sample rates of up to 23KHz (8-bit samples). Streaming mode can be both triggered, and non-triggered. In high-frequency mode, the MSP430 samples as quickly as it can (around 1MHz) and stores the samples in RAM. Due to the low amount of RAM, only 50 samples (8-bit) can be kept. High-frequency mode only works triggered, as the number of samples is very limited.
The "tools" of the MSP430 ToolBox are:
- Raw Digital Sampling (of all 6 I/O pins -- 2 are used for the UART).
- SPI Spy (Records data sent on MISO or MOSI channel, but not both at the same time).
- Interactive mode
Although the MSP430 toolbox has a limited sampling rate, in many development situations it is possible to strategically insert sleeps to bring down the rates.
Screenshots
First screenshot shows how the launchpad is connected to an ATMega88, which blinks all its input ports, and how theese blinks are captured:
This screenshot shows how a modified avrdude is used to program an ATMega88 with a simply blinky program:
Download
Source code for MSP430 firmware is available via git:
git://gitorious.org/msp430-toolbox/msp430-toolbox-firmware.git
Source code for MSP430 PC client is available via git:
git://gitorious.org/msp430-toolbox/msp430-toolbox-client.git
Patch for avrdude, which enables the MSP430 Toolbox to be used as an AVR programmer can be downloaded here.
Modified: Sun 10-Jul-11 12:09:57 PDT