I just received this package (TI msp430 - eZ430-F2013 Development tool) and got around to looking at the CDROM.
It claims to function with W2000 and/or XP. I am running W98FE, and am willing to mount W98SE if necessary. Does anybody know if that will work with it? Even better would be functionality on Linux.
On skimming through the documentation I cannot see how much memory actually exists in the package. Neither do I see any specification sheets for the actual chip. Does anybody have this information, or can you tell me where to get the appropriate sheets?
Later I will take a look at and see if that answers my questions.
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"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.
The schematics etc. are on the CD-ROM in the users_guides folder, and you can get the datasheet, if it's not there, off TI's website.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
2KB flash and 128B RAM. You need to download the data sheet for the MSP430F2013 and also the F2xx family guide from the TI site to be able to program these efficiently.
I found the data sheet. It appears to have 2KB + 256B Flash Memory, 128B RAM. Now the question is only whether the software will run on W98FE or possibly W98SE, or Linux. I am disappointed it has so little memory, I won't be anywhere near what I had hoped to develop for it. At worst I have wasted $10. But one would think they could include the data sheet on the CDROM.
--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.
The people who made mspgcc are working on a linux driver to support the USB JTAG devices used by TI. This is a closed proprietary interface, but TI lets them write confined closed source code for the driver portion, and the rest can be open. They already have a driver like this for Windows and it lets you use gdb.
There's a yahoo group that's quite active:
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That device is pretty cool - you have 2 sections: a USB JTAG section that connects to the target device using a 4-wire interface called SPY-BI-WIRE (2 are for power, 1 clock, and one signal), and then the small target section which can be disconnected. They let you get at all the target device pins, unlike the story with the little SiLabs ToolStick USB dongle device (which uses an 8 bit 8051).
Some people don't know that the whole thing can be disassembled by hand, and the JTAG section actually has a little bus connector that can be slid out without damaging the device. However, the plastic shell might be damaged when you pull it apart - it has little plastic pins that can break easily. But even if the shell breaks, the electronics should still work.
Have you noticed that the msp430 on the underside of the JTAG portion is much larger than the msp430 in the target section? They have a lot of devices in the 430 family with new ones added frequently. It looks to me like TI is taking a loss on these devices: $20 a piece is very cheap.
Msp430's do a great job with almost no current. It's a full 16 bit architecture (ALU and all registers are 16 bits wide), and I think of it as having a CISC instruction set (don't try to tell that to TI marketing) - you get some pretty advanced instuctions, including both source and target being in memory. It's also not Harvard, which means you can write some efficient code without jumping through hoops to implement your own software stack and nonsense like that.
You have an internal osc that is plenty accurate, that can be programmed to give you the target frequency you want. The F2xx devices can go up to 16 Mhz (the older ones can only do 8, but that's plenty fast with this decent architecture). The power down modes are great - you can keep a timer running with just a bit of juice and a battery can last 10 years - even if you don't have an ON/OFF switch. It comes up to full speed in 7us (unlike some devices that eat a ton of clocks while you wait for them to wake up).
The mspgcc port of gcc has been out for several years and is quite decent. The free IAR toolset that comes with that device has a code restriction of 4K, I believe, which means it will work fine since that device doesn't have more flash than that. IAR has been in the 430 space for years, and I think of it as being one of the best platforms they support (they have an exclusive deal with TI and they work hard to optimize their tools for the 430). Rowley's CrossWorks is also an excellent toolset for the 430.
My favorite msp430 is the msp430f1611, with 48K of flash and 10K of RAM. They have some more advanced chips coming soon with even more memory.
Softbaugh and Olimex have good DEV boards for these devices. The TI offerings have fewer features.
What you mean by "the software". Are you asking us what's on the CD you got? IIRC, it's IAR kickstart and/or TI CCE size-limited IDEs+toolchain. They won't run on Linux.
GCC targetted for MSP430 works find on linux. The Linux support for that particular USB debugger (it's some 2-wire scheme) interface is in progress, but isn't working yet. The Linux interfaces to the "normal" MSP430 JTAG interfaces for older MSP430 chips work fine.
Are you sure it's not there? I would have sworn the datasheet along with complete schematics were on the CD.
Have you looked on the TI website?
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I think it's only the parallel port JTAG dongle that works fine under Linux at the moment ($10 from Olimex). There are at least two USB JTAG dongles that work under Windows (from TI, and from Olimex), but I don't think they're working under Linux yet. I don't know about the 2-wire debugging at the moment.
So for Linux (or Win98), the easiest and cheapest setup is a parallel port JTAG debugger (with gcc and friends).
Now that is more like it. One can do an awful lot with such a component, and it should also be quite suitable for development of things to run on smaller configurations.
It would be nice to have 32k of RAM with the 48k flash, and a register to set the demarcation point, with the total available being a constant 64k. There could even be provision for using the (up to 16k) shadowed flash as initialization for the RAM.
--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.
You can also find this group mirrored on the NNTP server news.gmane.org as gmane.comp.hardware.texas-instruments.msp430.discuss if you prefer reading with a newsreader rather than a web interface.
-- "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush. "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." --Hermann Goering.
Try the adblock plugin for FireFox. Once you train it about which URLs to block it works quite well to remove the ads from Yahoo and most other sites. TIP: use wildcards off the root URL:
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*
Adblock is like TiVo in that regard - I can't live without either one :-)
I'm using slrn to read the list/group via an NNTP server. The suckage I'm referring to is the constant thread breakage and thread hijacking combined with a lot of very clueless posters asking stunningly vague, off-topic questions.
Many of the people posting to the group appear to have absolutely no software or microprocessor-related background and need help with very basic C language features and things as simple as how to edit a text file.
Tivo? Bah. MythTV rules!
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Hand me a pair of
at leather pants and a CASIO
visi.com keyboard -- I'm living
for today!
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