If you’re at all like us, or like [Vadim], you’ve got a stash of development boards in a shoebox on a shelf in your closet. If you’re better organized that we are, it might even be labeled “dev boards”. (Ah well, that’s a project for another day.) Anyway, reach into your box and pull one out, and put it to use. Do something trivial if you need to, but a dev board that’s driving a silly blinker is better than a dev board sitting in the dark.
[Vadim]’s good example to us all is going to serve as the brains for an automated plant watering system. That’s a low-demand application where the microcontroller can spend most of the time sleeping. [Vadim]’s first step, then was to get a real-time clock working with the hibernation mode. There’s working code inline in his blog.
If you use Arduino, you’ll feel at home in the Energia ecosystem. But it’s like ordering a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris: Energia is a Royale with Cheese (YouTube) — it’s the little differences. And maybe that’s the point of the exercise; it’s always a good thing to try out something new, even if it’s only minimally different.
So grab that unused dev board off the shelf, struggle through the unfamiliar development environment and/or toolchain, but remember to keep an eye out for the sweet little differences. The more tools that you’re familiar with, the more solutions will spring to mind when you’re hacking on your next project.
Lol, I actually have about two of each of the two to three types of stellaris launchpads, yes they are gathering dust, no they’re not in a labeled box but in plain site so they don’t get lost. One day!
Same here, MSP430 and a CC3000 gathering dust in my treasure chest. The ESP’s made the CC3000 truly worthless.
I’ve got two MSP430 and one MSP432 in the same condition. Not to talk about dozens of other’s brands uC’s
Now I have an idea, what to do with my TI Eval Boards ;-)
Maybe time to brush the dust of the FRAM launchpad… Maybe. Once I think of a compelling need for FRAM…
If you’re in the EU, I’ll trade you for one of the dust-collectors in my closet. I’ve been meaning to play around with FRAM for a while now.
Giant buffers on a tiny low power chip. FRAM isn’t just for nonvolatility. It also can act as RAM for those chips, which give you lots more than the kB or so on a normal chip.
I found that MSP430 can’t run certain Energia code while the same code runs fine on the Stellaris; I did post on Energia’s forums and few suggested that MSP430 has far less SRAM than Stellaris but either way I never got to the bottom of the true cause. MSP430 does work fine for me for simpler programs like tracking a rotary encoder…