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Comment by cpswan | Hacker News Reader

I've found the TI MSP-430 fairly good as a cheaper/rawer alternative to Arduino. It comes with Eclipse based tooling to program the microcontrollers in C or assembly.

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I was under the assumption that they didn't have many timers... I just looked again and maybe they added models with more than one timer but now they have some that are up to 4 timers and still only 1.50USD. That makes things more useful.

It should also be noted that the msp starter kit is only ~4 bucks and has a full usb starter board with i/o breakouts. pretty cool stuff.

the msp430 launchpad board is the cheap one, and I think if someone wanted to get into programming a MCU in C/C++, it is probably the cheapest and simplest way to do so (open tools, including GCC, are available, too)

the big advantage of the arduino is the software and the community.

I recently ordered a lot of parts for a project I'm working on and the low price of the LaunchPad made adding one to my order pretty much a no-brainer. Ends up this is a very nice little board. It's definitely less 'friendly' than the Arduino but it does allow for interactive debugging with gdb. Being able to step through a program running on the mcu without extra hardware was a nice surprise.

edit: I should also mention the program mspdebug which is a little simpler than gdb. I actually didn't look at this program much after seeing it could let me use gdb but I just looked it over a bit more and it also lets you step, set breakpoints, set registers, and more.

There are over 300 different models of the MSP430, ranging from the G2 or Value Line parts having 1k of Flash, a couple hundred bytes of RAM and usually one timer to the F5 series with 100-pin parts having 256kB of Flash and 16k of RAM, and 4 timers. Limiting yourself to stuff that's compatible with the $4.30 starter kit is not an accurate representation of the MSP430 lineup.

I agree. However, if you're not willing to spend money on Code Composer, IAR, or something similar, the GCC port isn't up to snuff on the 430X variants. In fact, the whole split personality of 16/20bit mode makes me want to just give up and use an ARM (Energy Micro EFM32, for instance).

The code limitations on CCS aren't too bad. Though, yes, ARM chips are awesome. STMicro has some really nice ones, with beautiful documentation and libraries.

If you are new to MCU's, I'm going to suggest you take the number of timers you think you need, and halve that. Maybe even quarter it.

Many jobs we wish to use the timer for can be done in other ways, and many jobs that need the timer can timeshare resources.

I am not an expert on them but it seemed like to do anything useful you would need at least 2+ timers and the msp430 that came with the starter board only had 1 and the other one had 2. do you have any links to better ways of dealing with those limitations?

I don't have links, I just sit down and think about how to best use my scarce resources. What do you need at least 2+ timers for? Maybe I can give you some tips.

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