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Comment by boots | Hacker News Reader

Extremely aggressive price for the microprocessor, but there are large hidden software costs. Their proprietary IDE is listed at $445 (http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/ccstudio.html)

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I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm not familiar with this stuff in the slightest, but the blog post mentions two supposedly free IDEs: IAR Embedded Kickstart, and Code Composer Studio 4.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Code_Composer_Studio...

http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/iar-kickstart....

When I worked in the TI DSP group (many years ago) we called it "Code Composter". $4.30 is cheap... but what about the time cost of using "Code Composter"?

This was about 6 years ago, so I hope for all the hacker that CC is better now.

The free IDE should be adequate for this and there is a port of GCC for the controller.

It, however, is Windows-only.

I have downloaded it and will try to run it under Wine, but I bet it won't like the USB.

Please update us with your findings once you try it.

Failed miserably. Parts of the software install, parts don't and, in general, it seems dysfunctional.

Is the IDE required? For me, a command line tool (compiler?) would suffice.

It looks like gcc can be used (http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/). I'll have to brush up on my C.

Same here, but I expect at least C code for those little chips will remain manageable in size.

Also llvm ( http://www.llvm.org ) has experimental msp430 backend.

[edit] Found the real development site: https://www.fooe.net/trac/llvm-msp430/wiki

Once compiled, how does the transfer to chip go?

There should be some kind of utilities. So far I have at least used one for Atmel AVR-s and MIPS architectures.

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