2015 was a busy year. The project that I had the most fun with was a bit off the beaten path compared to what I normally do. This started off as a fun project for a friend. It started off with, \”I have this LEGO project I need to put LEDs in, can you help me?\” Sure…Continue reading
Capacitive Touch Sensing on the MSP430 – 2013 Edition
I took a look at capacitive touch sensing on the MSP430 in 2011 and it was a little… lacking. I had another project come up and had a chance to play around with it again a couple months ago. It\’s nice to see the changes two years have made to the framework provided by TI.
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Capacitive Touch Sensing on the MSP430
One of the projects I\’m working on involves using capacitive touch sensing (CTS) on the TI MSP430. TI has been pushing their touch sensing capabilities recently and has even released a library that helps in implementing touch sensing on the MSP430. I decided to give it a try. The short story is that there is a lot on TI\’s site and it is easy to get confused as to what you need. See below for some of my journey getting it going.Continue reading
A Valentine Example for Blinking Lights
For Valentine\’s Day my son needed to make a \”mailbox\” for his kindergarten class. He & his mother made a rocket out of an old oat container. Since this was a family project, I decided that my contribution would be lighting it up. My son was quite excited when I told him that I was putting lights on it and it would have a computer to control them. Being sharp as a tack, he quickly asked, \”Daddy, where will the keyboard go?\” I had to explain that it would be a little computer without a keyboard, just a button. He was still excited.
The Never Ending Conversion
When using the ADC10 in an MSP430 with multiple conversions, the ADC10BUSY bit will stay on even after the conversions are done. Trying to be a good little programmer and checking to make sure the ADC is done will leave you hanging… forever. The conversions must be done for the data transfer and the data transfer controller (DTC) will set the ADC10 interrupt after it is done, therefore, the conversions must be done if the interrupt is run.
Accidental Double Interrupts on a Timer
I had a program where I was using a timer and an ISR to flip a bit on a TI MSP430. Well, the bit would only filp for a few milliseconds and then revert back to its prior value. As it turns out, I was calling the ISR twice every time I wanted it. Continue reading
MSP430, Entering and Exiting low Power Modes while Debugging
On a recent project I had one heck of a time trying to debug the program flow in CCS 4.2. I thought the code wasn\’t going anywhere because when I would break the program, it would stop on a line before where it should have been executing. After a couple days of troubleshooting with an oscilloscope, logic analyzer and TI, I got the bugs worked out of the program, but never did get a good answer as to why there was a debugging problem. There are known issues with putting a breakpoint right after an entry into a low power mode (LPM), but avoiding that didn\’t solve it.
My advice to you is to find some unused pins and use those attached to a logic analyzer or oscilloscope to see what is going on. Hopefully this makes it into Google and saves someone a lot of time.
Debug adapter for eZ430
![\"\"](\"http://curioussystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/eZ430-adapter.jpg\" "\\"eZ430")
For those of you who do prototyping with the eZ430 or eZ430-RF boards, this may be of interest. It\’s a debug adapter that you can put inline to make use of a logic analyzer or other test equipment easier. It expands out to 0.1\” spacing posts from the 0.05\” spacing used in the eZ430 connectors. Continue reading
Setting up an IAR Project using the TI MSP430 and SimpliciTI
Many of you know the possibilities that ultra-low power devices open up. One thing TI has done to make things even lower power is to craft their own \”lite\” protocol, SimpliciTI. You even get nice, examples for use when you install the protocol dev files. Now, what happens when you want to do something more than just compile the examples, good luck. Exactly what you need to add to the project is left as an exercise to the coder (you). This walk-thru is for using SimpliciTI with the ez430-RF2500 kit. Changing it for one of the other processors should not be hard, but I don\’t work with them.
The first thing is to make sure that you have the correct version of IAR. If you get the kickstart version off of IAR\’s web site, it will not allow you to link the projects because of the code size limitation (4k). You can get a 30 day unlimited trial from IAR. This example uses IAR Embedded Workbench version 4.20.1 and SimpliciTI v1.1.0.