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TI-MSP430 MICROCONTROLLERS  

The MSP430 series from Texas Instruments is an ultra-low power family of RISC based microcontrollers. They are extremely cheap and have a fantastic support plus easy availability by way of samples from TI.

During our work in the development of the General Purpose Bluetooth Interface we had to code the Bluetooth L2CAP layer in software and run it on a microcontroller. We did a big survey of the available uCs and their specifications. After taking many factors into account and jumping from one uC to another, we finally settled for this the MSP430F149 which is one of the most easy to use and program microcontroller. These were the major advantages that we saw while using this chip:-

• Had all the features that we needed
• Easy availability :: Free samples from TI
• Cheap cost ~$ 6 = Rs. 300/- (for MSP430F149, others are cheaper)
• Free gcc compatible C compiler: MSP-GCC for both Windows and Linux
• Free software: Insight or IAR C-SPY to burn the code into the uC Flash
• Excellent user base and support (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/msp430)
  

The other options that we were considering were the ATMEL ATMega series of uCs. The factors which went against them were cost and availability in India. Also, only the high end uCs were available which were way beyond our budget. Apart from the MSP430F149, there are also a lot of other uCs in the same family which can be used for different applications and needs.

One word of CAUTION is that there no in-built support in the MSP430 series of uCs through which external memory can be attached to the chip. If you use these uCs and reach a point wherein the memory has to be extended, you will need to do all the bit-banging and addressing through the software which can cause unneccesary trouble.

Some Tips:

• We used the dongle (or JTAG) available at http://www.olimex.com as the hardware for programming the uC.
• A proto-board is also available at http://www.olimex.com but there seems to be some problem in it w.r.t. one of the crystals. They have attached some external capacitors with the Low Frequency crystal which cause problems in its operation. We removed them when made our PCB and programs which did not run on the Olimex board, worked peacefully with our board.
• Here are the Basic Eagle Schematic and Board files for MSP430F149. Note that these will work with Eagle 4.01 and may not be compatible with future versions. These were given to us by Vivek Vaid. I thank him for the same.