μblog: engineering from the trenches

This weeks target is the MSP430F161(1). On a side note, I will be attending the last Hope conference in a few weeks and am looking forward to Travis Goodspeed’s MSP430 talk.

msp430-4x-stitch2.jpg

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This is in part a follow-up to the CC1110 IC Friday post from a few weeks back. TI has released a USB-dongle based development kit featuring their CC1111 system-on-chip radio communications IC. The board features an msp430 and the CC1111 on a self-contained USB stick and is about 50USD, a very reasonable price. For those that want something cheaper, the samples for the family of low-power RF chips are already available and shipping. Finally, the board reference design can be found here and is also mirrored below.

( swrr049.zip )

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For those that did not make it to this years msp430 day, here are copies of the presentations (in PDF format) and the source code (in ZIP format):

Presentation

Code

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My new found love for Cypress Semiconductor has led me to look at their other offerings besides the PSoC platform. The development kit was around 100USD with the software, USB programmer, LCD, and a few other toys. There are also a few that are as cheap as 30USD. Everything worked out of the box and I was able to test the first code on the PSoC only minutes after installing the software. Furthermore, Cypress is pretty good about sending samples, albeit in oversized boxes, so testing their design is pretty painless. For these reasons, I am going to try to implement a Cypress, low-speed USB device.

The basis for this design will be the CY7C638xx line of chips, which can be directly connected to the USB port and will even provide regulated 3.3V power to peripheral hardware. These chips also come in PDIP form factor which is good for prototyping. Once the samples arrive, I will try to make something based on the CY4623 USB optical mouse reference, something that will seamlessly fit in with the HID driver and will provide an input device to the computer. Maybe one day, interface it with an msp430 and track mu rhythm to move a pointer, all with a tiny USB device. For now, here is some documentation.

( cy7c638xx_8.pdf ) ( cy4623_mouse_reference_design_19.zip )

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I recently found this example (both in C and asm) to do similar to the auto baud rate detection posted below for the 8051.

( slaa215.zip ) ( slaa215.pdf )

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I have made the first step in getting an entry into the TI msp430 design contest: getting the LED to blink. The msp430 development kit comes with a JTAG flash emulation tool, a small dev board with a 64 pin ZIF socket as well as IAR workbench kickstart software. Running the IAR workbench is pretty easy so I opened their LED blink example and was able to compile it and then put the device into debug mode to download the binary onto the device and provide a clock via JTAG. After doing this, I verified that everything worked fine by unplugging the JTAG tool, hooking up XIN, XOUT, DVcc, DVss and \RST to a breadboard and a benchtop powersupply. When I applied power, the LED started blinking and I could see it blinking all the way down to about 1.5V (below the 1.8V spec for this MSP430F149.) Throwing in the JTAG tool/IAR workbench manual at the bottom.

( slau138c.pdf )

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Texas Instuments is sponsoring another design contest with the msp430 architecture. There is a downloadable development tool for the msp430 as well as an available online simulator so if you have a creative project, you need not actually invest money in a development kit, not that it’s expensive ($15.) Two finalists get some HDTVs and trips to the forthcoming msp430 conference.

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The title says it all, just finished the first revision of the msp430 test board. This board has a CS8900 ethernet controller on it as well as a MAX3221 connected to one of the UARTs on the MSP430F161. The four unused ports go to headers along with power to hopefully give this board some flexibility. I will post the set of CAD files when I get the board routed and components picked out.

( msp430-ethernet-v1.pdf )

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While reading more and more datasheets and application notes relating to the TI msp430, I am ready to summarize the two methods for getting data into the device after it has left the factory. For the purposes of this post, I am referring to MSP430F149 (datasheet) device, but this is generic enough to apply to any of the flash based devices with individual JTAG pins. The first method is to use a JTAG interface to put the device through the necessary steps to erase, program and verify the flash memory in the device. The other method is to access the Bootstrap Loader (BSL) on the device where flash can be programmed and verified using the UART0 running at 9600bps. (more…)

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