TI MSP430 LaunchPad
Look what arrived today! The Texas Instruments MSP430 LaunchPad was delivered today by Fedex. I had earlier requested some samples from TI, and had by mistake gotten a MSP430-something microcontroller. I had no way to program it so I though what the heck, I’ll buy something to program it with. After some research I discovered that TI had launched an Arduino rival. Since I already own several Arduinos and am fairly used to them, I thought it would be cool to test something new. To my astonishment this kit only cost $4.30 (roughly 3.50€), and when I discovered that TI had free 3-day-priority shipping to Finland, they had them selves a deal.
I haven’t had time to use it yet (I am however downloading all required software), so I can’t comment on the controller itself, but at least the packaging is superb. You are greeted with a short guide on how to set up the controller. I will probably review the board later, when I have had some time to use it.
But one thing I can say: for this price you won’t get anything even near this one. It is dirty cheap (about time for TI products, their calculators are so overpriced that you won’t believe it), and when combined with TI’s excellent customer support and free samples program, adds a great value to the electronics hobby community. TI have outdone themselves.
Update: I haven’t had much tim lately. I will soon post a detailed overview of the LaunchPad. However I can say that the installation experience was not optimal. First I had to choose what editor I wanted to use (TI’s website had no explanation of the difference between them). When I installed the software it took 6 hours to install it (mainly due to slow downloads from TI’s servers). I also had some problems setting up the debugging function of the LaunchPad on Windows 7, but after some tinkering I got it to work. Compared to programming the Arduino, the LaunchPad is very hard. You have to set amounts of variables to do some simple tasks. Maybe I will get the hang of it in a few weeks after having used it.
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