Lately I've been playing with the TI MSP430 LaunchPad. This post is a collection of links to resources that were helpful to me for getting started.
- Texas Instruments [overview of the various development kits/evaluation boards][]. A number of official BoosterPacks is listed on this site as well.
- The MSP430 LaunchPad can be bought directly from [Texas Instruments for $9.99][]. The price has gone up on 2013-03-01 from the original $4.30.
- NJC's MSP430 LaunchPad Blog contains a number of useful and accessible tutorials
- Four-Three-Oh! is a large community of hackers and tinkerers that is focused on the LauchPad. Much of the development surrounding the LauchPad happens here.
- Newark is a large supplier of both the LaunchPad boards and the microcontrollers themselves.
- Texas Instruments has a samples program where you can request a few additional microcontrollers at no charge
If you happen to use Ubuntu and want to write and compile C directly, here's how you would do that:
Step 1: Install necessary packages via apt-get:
sudo apt-get install msp430-libc mspdebug msp430mcu binutils-msp430 gcc-msp430 gdb-msp430
Step 2: Write your code using your favorite editor/environment.
Step 3: Compile the code using the msp430-gcc executable:
$ msp430-gcc -o main.elf *.c
Step 4: Flash the code onto the microcontroller:
mspdebug rf2500 'prog main.elf'