I suspect arduino herd will migrate to esp82xx, not msp430.
-Dan
On Tue, 11 Oct 2016, John Rehwinkel wrote:
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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