This morning Texas Instruments unveiled Launchpad, a development platform for their low-cost MSP430 line of microcontrollers. We’ve seen these chips before, most notably in the ez430 Chronos sports watch. We see this as a bid for the hobby market currently enjoyed by Arduino, PIC, AVR, and others. TI’s biggest selling point is price, but we’re going to wait to share that with you. Join us after the break to see what the package offers, then decide if the price is right.
What is it?
We received a contact request on our tip line from a public relations firm on behalf of Texas Instruments. The video conference paired us with one of their engineers who took us through the details of the package, mentioning the low price tag every minute or so. Launchpad is a programming and development board for the TI MSP430. It has a machined DIP socket that can accept chips with up to 20 pins. All of these pins are broken out to the header ports on either side of the board, which resemble the Arduino layout to us. Good news, unlike the Arduino the header spacing falls into the 0.1″ divisions necessary to interface with common protoboard. TI is also looking for community involvement, pushing thier Lunchapad Wiki to help you get stated and asking that you add you knowledge as you find success with the 16-bit platform.
What’s inside?
Each Launchpad device comes with a whole lot of goodness. In addition to the board itself you get a 0.5 meter USB cable, two pin headers and two pin sockets for the pin breakout pads, two different MSP430 microprocessors (MSP430G2211 and MSP430G2231), and two free IDEs; Code Composer Studio 4 and IAR Embedded Workbench Kickstart (note that the latter has a 4K or 8K code limitation depending on the processor used).
Price
Hands down TI is trying to make price the biggest issue with this release. The presentation we were given included the price in large red numbers on seven of the thirteen slides. So here it is: Launchpad will set you back four dollars and thirty cents. And for now shipping is included.
Conclusion
It’s important to note that we haven’t had the board in hand yet. That being said, for $4.30 it’s worth the risk just to get the USB cable and a couple of processors. We’re amazed that they’ve beaten back the price to this point and delighted that you get the programmer and two microcontrollers, not to mention the other components. We like the fact that they didn’t develop an alternative language like Arduino did for the AVR controllers. This makes it easy to clear the hurdle of setting up a programmer, IDE and toolchain, and get right down to developing in C. After all, the chips are dirt cheap and quite powerful. You may remember 3000 of them from a project we saw over the weekend.
We’d imagine the initial demand will be quite high and hope they have the stock to keep up.
Update:
Unboxing Video
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVHGjgkFPlU]
Demo Application Video
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0mGoRtYbyg]
[digg=http://digg.com/programming/TI_makes_a_big_bid_for_the_hobby_market_Hack_a_Day]
I ordered 4 from Digikey July 5 and recieved them July 8th.
I’d never buy from TI.com again. They signed me up to spam, lied to me over the phone (twice), and couldnt understand my aussie accent
Interesting that I’ve just tried to order, and I also get an error on the TI site, saying ” Unable to authorize payment: Error reading from ‘https://www.ti-estore.com/auth.asp’: Invalid HTTP response” :-(
However, it theory, that discount code still works.
admin@webdefend – if you cannot cope with “spam” from TI, then I suggest you find a new job, because being admin clearly doesn’t suit you. Especially not at something called “Webdefend”!
Plus, if they couldn’t understand your accent, how do you know they understood the question they replied to when lying to you?
FWIW I’ve used MSP430’s in my hobby projects as my goto micro when designing and have loved them. The gcc compiler/toolchain (http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/) works perfectly, and you can program them on the cheap (http://www.olimex.com/dev/msp-jtag.html) if you move away from the launchpad (a high end chip costs you ~5$ and has a lot of power) plus they don’t require much more than power and a cap to get a running board.
Agreed closed source IDE = crap and it seems like everyone here is saying that. It’s actually always blown my mind more people don’t use them, but from the comments here I’m understanding TI needs some more PR (or realizes we aren’t exactly a market driver)
project complete, but my wife is afraid to try it out. guess i’ll have to check craigslist for guinea pig hookers. will HaD feature this thing? sadly, i think not.
Yay! Just got an email from TI EVM Order Shipment Confirmation.
My 2 Launchpads will be arriving in Singapore via FedEx Standard on 19 July!
Yay, it’s arrived. Now, how do I use this thing?
I’ve got no experience at all with hardware stuff.
Got mine this morning (UK).
I couldn’t resit ordering 2 kits but now I fail to see any logical reason why I did so… Can’t blame TI for their pricing strategy I guess.
YES!
Ordered two the first day (June 23rd?), shipment was delayed or back-ordered, order got invoiced/shipped on July 9th, both arrived today, July 16th 2010, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Just posting to note that it will let me program the MSP430F series in addition to the G series. So far I’ve tested the MSP430F2002, MSP430F2012, and the MSP430F2013, which were all the ones I had on hand.
There is a new blog and forum for MSP430 projects if anybody is interested in sharing ideas and thoughts.
http://www.43oh.com/
http://www.43oh.com/forum/
The community is new, but hopefully pick up once people get their kits.
I’m still waiting for my Launchpads.
Ordered late the 23rd, they shipped yesterday, just got a delivery email a little while ago.
Just found the User’s Guide. T I Literature #SLAU318
>Ordered late the 23rd, they shipped yesterday,
>just got a delivery email a little while ago.
I also ordered on the 23rd, but haven’t received it yet.
i too ordered on the 23/06 from ti. though i expect it to take awhile to get to new zealand.
Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve got the bait and switch deal from TI e-store, a division of the company I otherwise respect.
I ordered 2 LaunchPads on June 23, checked the e-store a week later, discovered that my “order has been shipped”, but did not received anything yet.
Where they ship these units from? Venus?
Got my two sample chips today, the board is backordered.
Looking at the TI site, I noticed that to start with, you could order any number of these boards, and apply a halfprice discount too. Then the discount vanished, and a few days later orders were capped to 3 per person. The lady who called to take my order said this was due to abuse…
As an appeal to the community, can I ask that you get one board and a few chips, rather than ordering 3 boards, unless you really need them? If they can’t get this to work, then TI might decide not to do things like this in future, and that would be a big loss for us all.
TI Australia said yesterday (6 Aug.) that new stock will be available by mid month. My original order (23/06) for one got lost somewhere in the system without a trace.
IJD
Ordered more than a month ago, and TI still didn’t ship. Local TI Germany subsidiary couldn’t care less :-(
So much for TI making a big bid for the hobby market.
I don’t agree with NKT above. Ordering more than one is not abuse by the community. TI could, at any time, have stopped taking orders. Instead they continued and still continue to take orders. Orders for a product they don’t have and fail to ship.
TI can’t get this to work, because the company is not equipped and not willing to deal with small orders and hobbyists, not because hobbyists buy what is offered.
TI did a botch job when planing this, e.g. they forgot about their HALFMSPTOOL discount. What kind of shop management is that, not knowing that you have a discount program running? And being caught with pants down when international orders came in, because they forgot to limit free shipping to the US only. Things like this happen when management doesn’t take something serious and leave it to the intern.
TI not doing things like this in the future is no loss for “us all”. I consider it a good thing if TI stays out of something they don’t care about and fail to do.
Hey TI, if you can’t deliver, and if you don’t care, why not stick with what you can (whatever that is …), and leave the hobby market to those who can and care?
Ian: I am in Australia and also think that my order has gotten lost without a trace. Can I ask who you called?
Does anyone know if there are any distributors with stock? I ordered on 24 Jun 2010 but Mouser.com won’t have stock till 14 Sept 2010.
So, was just at the website, free shipping is gone, you only have a choice between overnight (four times the price of the board) and 2 day (only double the cost of the board). UGH.
Having no experience with programmable chips like these, would this thing be suitable for making a game controller convertor? Is there enough space for that sort of code?
International shipping is now $15. A lot for something they don’t have and can’t ship. But they still take orders with their ridiculously broken online shop.
55 Days and TI hasn’t sorted out their shit. A big bid for the hobby marked? Hahahahahahaha. Losers.
I was going to buy a pair of them to play with, but the shipping charges triple the cost. I wonder what the book rate would be?
Finally got mine from Mouser about 5 days ago. Still haven’t been bothered to boot into windows to set up the programming environment, though.
Have faith folks! My 3 kits (sorry I’m greedy :} ) arrived today. I’d ordered through the TI eStore, not from Mouser et al, so YMMV, but hang in there, they are showing up!
Mine came in yesterday. A lot of people are getting it now. In any case, there is a small community at 43oh.com/forum .
Mine came a few days ago. TI overnighted it with FedEx.
Wow. Ordered mine in June, just got delivered today.
The Launchpads are also available in Europe from Watterott: http://www.watterott.com/en/MSP430-LaunchPad-MSP-EXP430G2
…and they have over 800 pcs in stock.
I need this hardware to make OpenSource yubico.com token. With 3-5 button. HID keyboard. Nothing else
I ordered mine July 15. They just arrived today (just in time for Christmas).
I ordered one from DigiKey the 15th of December. It came today, the 21st.
It’s obviously quite limited, but looks to be pretty good glue logic for a lot of things.
My real interest is in the higher end parts, but I need to start somewhere and this will do nicely.
What I’d really love is similar boards for the high end parts that you could quickly hack for
one off projects.
I ordered mine on 9th of September and the 3rd of November. Got mine about a week ago, then sampled a couple more of their MCUs.
Second order couldn’t authorize yet they sent me my MSP430 kit anyway. I had to phone them up to resolve that order but whatever.
Shipping is FREE again!!
I just ordered mine today after a long wait and is being shipped free or charge all the way across the world to India. Anyone who was left out can order it, my UK credit card was not accepted earlier. Make sure the shipping address is same as the billing address (same continent I mean!) .
Why won’t TI let me use these for my military?
Linux Version is coming . . .
http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Category:Code_Composer_Studio_v5
They are not shipping to India. Very disappointing
I made a video showing how to get started
with Assembly and IAR
http://youtu.be/6p-TUhEFxPI
these may be really cheap but in economically not so sound countries like India
each American buck magnifies 50 times so a $4 development board cost 200bucks here…and so are the components..
if TI was aiming for the nerds it should have done so by introducing it for the university program like microchip..
at 250+shipping (which takes forever) this although cheaper than the rest cant compete with AVR,
a good start by TI i would say
$4.45 is a fixed cost that you pay once the $25 to $50 for the other alt is a variable cost that you pay everytime. If you are the only one who will ever use your code you probably shouldn”t spend the time.