Its been awfully long since I posted. Just been lazy and unable to get into the groove! I have been fighting robots that were on the verge of taking over the world and now I know a thing or two about controlling them...woops, bonkers! Time to move on...
Last week I attended the Texas Instruments MCU Deep Dive workshop and had a hands-on sessions experimenting with the MSP430 ultra-low-power MCU. The dev board was called the 'LaunchPad' and the TI folks had put together this 2-day workshop on not only MSP430 but also C2000, Stellaris and Hercules MCU's.
These were all new MCUs to me as I was only aware of Microchip and Atmel families till now. TI MCUs was new, though they have been around for decades (just shows how out-dated I was!) I checked out the use-cases for these online and then decided to take up the MSP430 track because I found quite a few hobbyists using it and the use-cases were something which I could experiment with in my free time.
After getting familiarized with Code Composer Studio and doing a few led-blinky exercises with the Launchpad development board, we went over in detail with the in-built timers, UARTs, temperature sensors and ADCs (which did not work for me :( ). It was great getting to learn something hands-on and experimenting as soon as the theory was done with. And its been a long time since I worked on MCUs again!
This was a one-of-a-kind event which I havent seen happening before. There were almost a 100 ppl in the MSP430 track, comprising mostly of embedded folks and a few students too.
Anyway, in the coming months I will be experimenting with the Launchpad board plus use the AVR MCU that I already have. Will try and build something from it ;) more on that later...
Hasta-la-vista!
it's always good to be converset with as many technologies as possible as it develops a deeper understanding and creation of hybrid products which would not have been possible with just one technology !
ReplyDeleteVinod M Bhatt