This year I got a new toy for my birthday once again: the MSP430 USB Stick Development Tool from Texas Instruments, with software on CD. It is a development board from Texas Instruments for the MSP430 16-bit RISC microcontroller.
A few weeks ago I already gave the device a first try with the obligatory “Hello World” program for microcontrollers (blinking an LED). The board and the microcontroller worked flawlessly. The development environment on the CD was installed quickly. It appears to be a modified version of Eclipse. Unfortunately, after that I lacked the motivation, or rather the time, to dig into it any deeper. Another reason was that without soldering on the board it wasn’t all that easy to connect other hardware. Solder pads for the microcontroller’s pins are there, though, as the following picture shows:
Since I had some time today, I unpacked the stick again to make the whole thing a bit more developer-friendly. First I soldered pin headers to the corresponding solder pads. That makes it possible to plug jumper wires onto them and use the microcontroller’s pins. This already makes working with a breadboard a lot easier.
Unfortunately, the whole thing no longer fit into the fancy TI plastic case afterwards. No problem. Using a Dremel with a cutting disc, I cut into the case in the right places. Then I carefully broke out the cut plastic rectangle with a flat screwdriver. After that I filed down the broken edges a little and snapped everything back together. Done. The result of this tinkering session can be seen in the last photo.
I’ll be writing about my further experiences with the ez430-F2013 soon.
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