I just received this package (TI msp430 - eZ430-F2013 Development
tool) and got around to looking at the CDROM.

It claims to function with W2000 and/or XP. I am running W98FE,
and am willing to mount W98SE if necessary. Does anybody know if
that will work with it? Even better would be functionality on
Linux.

On skimming through the documentation I cannot see how much memory
actually exists in the package. Neither do I see any specification
sheets for the actual chip. Does anybody have this information, or
can you tell me where to get the appropriate sheets?

Later I will take a look at <http://www.ti.com/ez430> and see if
that answers my questions.

--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.

On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:48:27 -0400, the renowned CBFalconer
<cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote:

No idea. The board uses a USB-serial bridge chip.

The schematics etc. are on the CD-ROM in the users_guides folder, and
you can get the datasheet, if it's not there, off TI's website.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

CBFalconer wrote:

2KB flash and 128B RAM. You need to download the data sheet for the
MSP430F2013 and also the F2xx family guide from the TI site to be able
to program these efficiently.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

Spehro Pefhany wrote:
I found the data sheet. It appears to have 2KB + 256B Flash
Memory, 128B RAM. Now the question is only whether the software
will run on W98FE or possibly W98SE, or Linux. I am disappointed
it has so little memory, I won't be anywhere near what I had hoped
to develop for it. At worst I have wasted $10. But one would
think they could include the data sheet on the CDROM.

--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.

CBFalconer wrote:

The people who made mspgcc are working on a linux driver to support the
USB JTAG devices used by TI. This is a closed proprietary interface,
but TI lets them write confined closed source code for the driver
portion, and the rest can be open. They already have a driver like this
for Windows and it lets you use gdb.

There's a yahoo group that's quite active:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/msp430/

That device is pretty cool - you have 2 sections: a USB JTAG section
that connects to the target device using a 4-wire interface called
SPY-BI-WIRE (2 are for power, 1 clock, and one signal), and then the
small target section which can be disconnected. They let you get at all
the target device pins, unlike the story with the little SiLabs
ToolStick USB dongle device (which uses an 8 bit 8051).

Some people don't know that the whole thing can be disassembled by
hand, and the JTAG section actually has a little bus connector that can
be slid out without damaging the device. However, the plastic shell
might be damaged when you pull it apart - it has little plastic pins
that can break easily. But even if the shell breaks, the electronics
should still work.

Have you noticed that the msp430 on the underside of the JTAG portion
is much larger than the msp430 in the target section? They have a lot
of devices in the 430 family with new ones added frequently. It looks
to me like TI is taking a loss on these devices: $20 a piece is very
cheap.

Msp430's do a great job with almost no current. It's a full 16 bit
architecture (ALU and all registers are 16 bits wide), and I think of
it as having a CISC instruction set (don't try to tell that to TI
marketing) - you get some pretty advanced instuctions, including both
source and target being in memory. It's also not Harvard, which means
you can write some efficient code without jumping through hoops to
implement your own software stack and nonsense like that.

You have an internal osc that is plenty accurate, that can be
programmed to give you the target frequency you want. The F2xx devices
can go up to 16 Mhz (the older ones can only do 8, but that's plenty
fast with this decent architecture). The power down modes are great -
you can keep a timer running with just a bit of juice and a battery can
last 10 years - even if you don't have an ON/OFF switch. It comes up to
full speed in 7us (unlike some devices that eat a ton of clocks while
you wait for them to wake up).

The mspgcc port of gcc has been out for several years and is quite
decent. The free IAR toolset that comes with that device has a code
restriction of 4K, I believe, which means it will work fine since that
device doesn't have more flash than that. IAR has been in the 430 space
for years, and I think of it as being one of the best platforms they
support (they have an exclusive deal with TI and they work hard to
optimize their tools for the 430). Rowley's CrossWorks is also an
excellent toolset for the 430.

My favorite msp430 is the msp430f1611, with 48K of flash and 10K of
RAM. They have some more advanced chips coming soon with even more
memory.

Softbaugh and Olimex have good DEV boards for these devices. The TI
offerings have fewer features.

Eric

On 2006-06-07, CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote:

What you mean by "the software". Are you asking us what's on
the CD you got? IIRC, it's IAR kickstart and/or TI CCE
size-limited IDEs+toolchain. They won't run on Linux.

GCC targetted for MSP430 works find on linux. The Linux
support for that particular USB debugger (it's some 2-wire
scheme) interface is in progress, but isn't working yet. The
Linux interfaces to the "normal" MSP430 JTAG interfaces for
older MSP430 chips work fine.

Are you sure it's not there? I would have sworn the datasheet
along with complete schematics were on the CD.

Have you looked on the TI website?

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! .. One FISHWICH
at coming up!!
visi.com

Spehro Pefhany wrote:
You will need at least 98SE. But the driver model is not the same as
2000 and up.

Grant Edwards wrote:
I think it's only the parallel port JTAG dongle that works fine under
Linux at the moment ($10 from Olimex). There are at least two USB JTAG
dongles that work under Windows (from TI, and from Olimex), but I don't
think they're working under Linux yet. I don't know about the 2-wire
debugging at the moment.

So for Linux (or Win98), the easiest and cheapest setup is a parallel
port JTAG debugger (with gcc and friends).

Grant Edwards wrote:
That's where I found the data sheet. I couldn't find it on the CD,
the closest thing is the MSP4302xx family users guide.

I am in no rush. I can wait for the Linux debuggery to be
available. Since TI make the module in two parts (the processor
and the debug interface) you would also think they would make
larger processor portions available. I also don't see an assembler
yet, but I haven't really looked.

--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.

On 2006-06-07, CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote:

The USB half of the widget will talk to any MSP430 processor
that uses the 2-wire "spy-by-wire" pseudo-JTAG interface. I
don't know that TI is going to ship anything that plugs
directly into the EZ-whatsit, but TI showed video of somebody
debugging a different proto board by using clip-leads beatween
the proto board and the EZ-whatsit.

I've never used anything except GCC+binutils and the
parallel-port to "normal" JTAG interface under Linux, but I've
heard a lot of bad things about TI's CodeComposer. I guess IAR
is OK if one wants a MS-Windows GUI IDE.

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Life is selling
at REVOLUTIONARY HAIR
visi.com PRODUCTS!

On Wed, 07 Jun 2006 05:18:12 -0400, CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com>
wrote:

The code for the larger processor probably won't be easily available.
It would include the debugging support code that works with the JTAG
of the target and that information is currently only available to
those TI wants to discuss it with for their own business reasons.
Giving it out would, in effect, disclose information they are
currently working rather hard to keep controlled.

Jon

Eric wrote:
Now that is more like it. One can do an awful lot with such a
component, and it should also be quite suitable for development of
things to run on smaller configurations.

It would be nice to have 32k of RAM with the 48k flash, and a
register to set the demarcation point, with the total available
being a constant 64k. There could even be provision for using the
(up to 16k) shadowed flash as initialization for the RAM.

--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.

"Eric" <englere.geo@yahoo.com> wrote...
You can also find this group mirrored on the NNTP server news.gmane.org as
gmane.comp.hardware.texas-instruments.msp430.discuss if you prefer reading
with a newsreader rather than a web interface.

On 2006-06-08, Matthew Kendall <mdkendall@hotmail.com> wrote:

There's also an mspgcc mailing list.

Which is also available via gmane (which, IMO, is the only
acceptible way to do participate in mailing lists).

Unfortunately, gmane still can't eliminate the general suckage
of yahoo groups. :/

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Did you move a lot
at of KOREAN STEAK KNIVES this
visi.com trip, Dingy?

Matthew Kendall wrote:
Yes, that is much more convenient. Thanks.

--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we." -- G. W. Bush.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way
in any country." --Hermann Goering.

Try the adblock plugin for FireFox. Once you train it about which URLs
to block it works quite well to remove the ads from Yahoo and most
other sites. TIP: use wildcards off the root URL:
http://ads.garbage.com/*

Adblock is like TiVo in that regard - I can't live without either one
:-)

Eric

On 2006-06-09, Eric <englere.geo@yahoo.com> wrote:
I'm using slrn to read the list/group via an NNTP server. The
suckage I'm referring to is the constant thread breakage and
thread hijacking combined with a lot of very clueless posters
asking stunningly vague, off-topic questions.

Many of the people posting to the group appear to have
absolutely no software or microprocessor-related background and
need help with very basic C language features and things as
simple as how to edit a text file.

Tivo? Bah. MythTV rules!

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Hand me a pair of
at leather pants and a CASIO
visi.com keyboard -- I'm living
for today!