The MSP-EXP430G2 Launchpad from TI is an inexpensive development board that comes with two processors, a 32K crystal, two headers sockets, a usb lead and two stickers.
The latest boards come with the MSP430G2553 and the MSP430G2452 processors but the first revision came with the MSP430G2231 and MSP430G2211.
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 030: ID 0451:f432 Texas Instruments, Inc. eZ430 Development Tool
USB TP3 GND VBUS TP1 J3 = SW UART VCC 3V3 GND P1.0 (LED1) A0 P2.6 XIN P1.1 (UART) A1 TXD P2.7 XOUT P1.2 (UART) A2 RXD TEST P1.3 (S2) A3 (S1) RST P1.4 A4 SDA MISO A7 P1.7 P1.5 A5 SCK SCL MOSI A6 (LED2) P1.6 P2.0 CS P2.5 P2.1 P2.4 P2.2 P2.3 P1.3 P1.0 P1.6 RESET GND S2 LED1 LED2 S1 GND RED GREEN VCC
First install the development and programming/debugging tools.
Demo
hg clone http://hg.kewl.org/pub/msp430-launchpad/ cd msp430-launchpad make make program
The board will flash the LEDs until the button is pressed to enter probe mode.
Probe mode sends the binary encoded value of the chip temperature over the communications port.
Communication can be tested with picocom
picocom -b 2400 /dev/ttyACM0
Or,
linux-serial-test -s -R raw -t -p /dev/ttyACM0
It should be noticed that the TI demo was written for devices without a hardware UART and the DIP switches needs to be in the SW UART position to operate.
When attaching the 32768 Hz crystal, R28 and R29 can be removed to disable header access to XIN and XOUT.
The through holes can be used to attach a generic crystal which is easier to solder than the SMD crystal.