Thursday, June 21, 2012

Flip my Bits Cheat Sheet and Code Snippets


I have been chewing through over a thousand pages of various technical publications on the MSP430, the LaunchPad Labs and some great blogs in an effort to not only master this chip for myself, but to also create a good novice user guide. These are a work in progress and will certainly be updated.

I'll also state that my chip of choice within the MSP430 Value Line has become the MSP430G3533 because out of 40 chips, it is available, and has the most peripherals (I must have a UART and an ADC!)
I get mine from Mouser.

Flip My Bits: Register Manipulation and C Refresher [Link]

MSP430 Code Snippets [Link]

My other interests [Link]

Thursday, June 14, 2012

An Easy Tool for Reading and Writing Hex to a MSP430




I have been gearing up to get seriously deep with the Texas Instruments (TI) LaunchPad value-line processors, with a particular focus on mastering the Air Module CC110L RF BoosterPack so I can develop some wireless sensors. For about $20, TI sells a pair of the RF shields with pre-programmed chips. My immediate concern was to make sure that I could return those chips to their original program in case I messed them up with my hacking. I simply wanted the means of sucking the hex code out of the microcontroller and saving it so I could reload it later. After fruitless hours trying to do this with both IAR and CCS, I found the perfect tool: Elprotronic's FET-Pro Lite SW (free). It is designed to talk to any of the TI FET programmers (LaunchPad has one built in). You simply dial in the specific chip plugged into your LaunchPad board, plug in the USB cable, and select read on the GUI's menu. When a matrix of code appears, select the TI format (which is a text file (TXT) as opposed to an Intel .hex format). To be sure it worked, I copied the chip's hex code, erased the chip, proved to myself that nothing was going on, and reloaded the code successfully. In the process of this, I discovered that one of my 3 LaunchPad boards was defective, as any attempt to read a programmed chip's code yielded only 00s of FFs (signifying a blank device). In any even, this FET-Pro Lite is a great sanity check and a useful tool.


To get the FET-Pro430 Lite software (free) goto


For the Air module source code goto http://www.anaren.com/air/cc110l-air-module-boosterpack

Download the BoosterStack CD Zip file (all files and documents) (newly updated Jan 24, 2012)

The TI hex code is found in this text file:
120124 - CD ROOT\CD ROOT\Firmware\_FactoryDefault\AirBoosterStack.txt


To purchase the Air Module CC110L RF BoosterPack goto


My other interests: [Link]