There is something to be said about how easy it is to write Arduino code. For those of who you are big fans of the MSP430 and Texas Instrument’s LaunchPad series, an upcoming release of Energia brings Arduino style coding to the two newest member of the LaunchPad family: the TivaC Connected LaunchPad EK-TM4C1294XL and Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad MSP-EXP430FR5969LP.
“Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform … with the goal to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad.” The newest release of Energia is exciting for the sole reason that the new TivaC Connected LaunchPad and Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad are supported. The TivaC Connected LaunchPad is a $20 development board for TI’s low-power ARM processors that has Ethernet connectivity. The MSP430 at the heart of the Wolverine FRAM LaunchPad uses up to 250x less power than flash based MCUs at low speeds in addition to many other cool benefits.
Be sure to keep an eye out for the new version of Energia, it should be arriving sometime next week. Now is a better time than ever to try out the Tiva C or the MSP430 MCUs!
Nick, there is no such thing as “250% less power”, as that would imply that the MSP *produces* one and a half times as much power as other MCUs *consume*
250 times, not 250%, I think the implication was that the MSP430 can consume as low as 1/250th of the power other micros may consume.
Sorry, misread that in the article.
Going further, the data for this is on the TI site already linked in the article.
From TI:
“FRAM consumes 250x less power than Flash-based devices when running at equal speed (12kB/s)
Test case
CPU speed @ 8MHz
Both memory options capped @ 12kB/s throughput (typical application)
FRAM consumes 9μA @ 12kB/s
Flash consumes 2200μA @ 12kB/s”
Only if TI stays away from the IDE and the example code. TI’s engineers write the WORST code on the planet, all the example stuff for the MSP430 and the Watch are nothing but nasty convoluted spaghetti code. Plus most everything is so undocumented it’s horrible.
TI makes good hardware, but they need to fire the entire programming section.
Download energia for yourself and take a look, it just uses the existing examples from the arduino IDE with pin numbers changed to match the launchpad boards. It is a straight fork of wiring with support for TI microcontroller architectures (MSP430, C2000 and Stellaris/Tiva are all supported) instead of AVR.
I already use Energia for my MSP430G launchpad and stellaris launchpad. Ordered the TivaC connected launchpad.
With Energia, an IDE similar to Arduino I find it hard to believe that these boards haven’t been more popular since they are more affordable. I just ordered one of the Connected board. Seriously, a board with 120MHz, 1MB Flash, 256KB SRAM, 6KB EEPROM and ethernet for $20 with USB cable and shipping included? Can’t wait to get it!
Thanks for the heads up on Energia!
Downloading Energia now. Maybe now I wont drop kick the Tiva across the room!
So. Let me get this straight. You are announcing a *pending* release, one for which not even a release date has been made available?
Is it really that slow of a news day?
I love Energia, but it really needs a better packaging system. I (currently) only have one of the supported devices, but I still have to download hundreds of MB of stuff for each of the other four every time it’s updated (I think there’s even a Java runtime in there somewhere). I’m thinking a “core” archive, then a set of platform-specific archives one unzips on top of the core.
Energia doesnt handle analogWrite. It gets all the pins mixed up and assigns the write value to all pins.
Works 100% fine for me
TI’s only good products are from the chip companies they bought.
Their embedded chip lines are a terrible deal for developers and manufacturers.
If they ported a gcc cross compiler than I might reconsider their product line.
But currently… the software sucks like VB 3.0 , and they are still conducting business likes its 1995… Mostly suckering naïve kids into investing their time into proprietary BS.
This may help people interpret the technology better:
https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt
There is a gcc port for MSP430, mspgcc. However, development for it has stopped in favor of just adding the architecture into GCC 4.9. Redhat is working with TI to do so. If you download their beta for Code Composer Studio 6.0, you can even run Redehat’s GCC 4.8 development version with MSP430 support compiled in right now, which is what I’m doing.