Saturday, January 28, 2012

Amazing Grace!


Grace is AMAZING! So is Texas Instruments (TI) Grace, a graphical application for setting up a MSP430 microprocessor. Going through all of the LaunchPad labs, I gained an appreciation for the complexity of this little chip: nearly 1000 pages of reference material to set up all of the registers, to configure the clock, timers, I/O ports and A/D converters. The normal process involves flipping bits in a bunch of registers using cryptic ANSI C. The material and examples they provided in that wiki made it possible for me. The very last lab in the series introduced Grace. You just can't appreciate Grace until you see how difficult it is without it, and how much it cost. Someone made a great sacrifice to make this kind of access available. Yet it is FREE!
It is like the Denny's menu: you point to the pretty pictures and make a selection through pull downs. Once you make all of your selections on the graphical interface, you can see the actual C code that it generated on another page tab. Grace is called up in your program as a function. It permits you to spend more time on developing your application and less on setting it up. It is really GREAT!

Grace wiki [Link]

Screen shots of all Grace windows [Link]

LaunchPad wiki [Link]

My other interests [Link]

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