> Well, regarding to the love the MSP430s get, I suspect that as soon as
> Microchip starts discontinuing the AVRs, the Arduino herd will have to
> migrate to greener pastures, and I think that's where the MSP430's are.
You're probably right. There's already the Energia port of the Arduino IDE to
the MSP43x architecture. And it's impossible to put the genie back in the
bottle. The IDE already supports plug-ins for different architectures, and
there are dozens available and more coming. Lots of ARM based ones as well
(including official Arduino branded offerings). There is PIC support, for
people who like Microchips more primitive offerings, and even X86 ones, for
people who like Intel's more primitive offerings.
Back when I had outgrown the PIC architecture (and lost patience with some of
the things that go with it), I had looked at the MSP430 as a possible next
step, as TI has just introduced it and was offering the launchpads and watch
kit at an eponymous $4.30 price. Unfortunately, at that time, it was DOS-only,
which was a dealbreaker for me (now they support modern operating systems). I
went to AVR at the time and it has served me well, but I've since embraced
MSP430 and ARM too.
> I'm evaluating to port the Marlin 3D-Printer firmware, which works on the
> ATMega platform to the MSP432 one. It has no ETA, but I think it's a
> worthwhile move.
If it's not in assembler, shouldn't be too tough a port (I've ported several
projects from AVR to MSP430, and it's generally been straightforward). The
FRAM based parts have a nice hidden bonus as well: you can use the FRAM as RAM,
gaining a bunch more memory and it's non-volatile. It's not quite as fast as
the RAM, so you have a choice of either running it with a wait state or running
at 8MHz (I went with 8MHz, which was fast enough for my needs, and saved
battery as well). It's tricky, as the RAM and FRAM memory is non-contiguous,
so you have to be careful with how you lay things out. Additionally, some of
the FRAM is addressed higher than (IIRC) 64k, and earlier compilers don't
support that very well ("large" memory model). I ended up using low FRAM as
RAM and high FRAM as flash, which was good enough for my project. These days,
I'd hope the compiler issues have been ironed out.
For the curious, here's a picture of a project I built using an MSP430FR5969 as
the CPU:
http://www.vitriol.com/images/tech/equipment/homer-bare-800.jpg
<http://www.vitriol.com/images/tech/equipment/homer-bare-800.jpg>
- John
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