The MSP430 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

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

                                               GND
P1.3   P1.0 P1.6                   RESET       GND
S2     LED1 LED2                   S1          VCC
       RED  GREEN

First install the development and programming 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

It should be noticed that the TI demo was written for devices without a hardware UART.

Product page

MSP430G2452 product page

MSP430G2553 product page

Tutorial

Examples