Stew’s Spot

I ordered 3 TI MSP430 LaunchPad development kits last month and they finally arrived, there was a huge demand for the boards (they cost $4.30 each) so the delay is understandable.  Two are mine and the third is for a friend.

Opening the box there is a Getting started booklet, the Dev board, a second MSP430 microprocessor, some Headers, a 32KHz crystal and a USB cable. I like the little touches on the packaging, like the “Happy Coding, MSP430 MSU Team” message.

I’ve tested it in Arch Linux and everything seems to work fine.  By the way, if you are using MSPDebug (version 0.9 or higher) to interface to the LaunchPad you’ll need to use the “rf2500″ driver and it should connect straight away.

mspdebug rf2500

For more information try the following websites:

• Official MSP430 LaunchPad Wiki.
• msp430-gcc on Arch Linux tutorial by Broken Code.

Now I’ve just got to find something to use them for…

A couple of days ago I saw this story on Hack a Day (On the Go Prototyping)

[Riley Porter] has been working on several different custom enclosure designs … as well as slick-looking cases for the Bus Pirate, tinyISP, and face plates for word clocks.

Well the cases were pretty slick-looking. I liked his ideas of using layers of laser cut perspex, so I designed my own Bus Pirate V2go and Atmel AVR Dragon cases.

Thanks to my friend Warren for cutting them for me.

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