Tinkering TI MSP430F5529

Epilogue

My journey with MSP430F5529 has been a mixture of success and failure. It is successful in terms of being able to apply driverlib successfully while being able to master a mid-range high performance TI microcontroller. Most of the hardware is similar to other MSP430 micros and so I had little or no issues understanding them. This is for the first time I got to get myself introduced with a TI micro that has USB hardware as well as other advanced hardware like DMA, RTC, hardware multiplier, etc that are typically found in ARM microcontrollers. Previously, I have seen similar microcontrollers like PIC18F4550 and ATMega32U4 but none of them were as rich as MSP430F5529 when it comes to both hardware and software suites.

The failure part is the time it took for me to get all these things together because on the internet I didn’t find much support for most of the stuffs I needed to know quickly. I had to read lot of docs and try out several things before I could make a solid conclusion. However, after completing this tutorial doc, I believe no one will have issues as I had. I also believe that it will pave way for developing stuffs with TI’s Tiva C ARM microcontrollers as working with Tiva micros need knowledge of TivaWare – a software suite from TI that is similar to MSP430Ware.

To summarize, this MSP430 beast packs a good punch that can help us avoid investing on an ARM overkill or on other expensive platforms. It has everything to make devices like a datalogger, a USB power meter, an advanced MPPT solar charge controller, a balancing robot, etc. In fact, in my professional career, I have seen several control systems that host TI microcontrollers like the MSP430F5529. MSP430F5529 is like an ARM micro in 16-bit disguise. I would strongly urge readers to explore this microcontroller family and beyond. Last but not least, TI microcontroller portfolio has microcontrollers for various application-specific purpose but compared to other manufacturers TI’s microcontrollers are smart and well-designed in terms of hardware management. TI also manufactures other digital and analogue components. This allows us to design a complete board with all-TI components while making TI a good component partner.  

The PDF version of this post and the code examples can be found here.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Related Posts

14 comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *