Texas Instruments Serial Programming Adapter MSP430 User manual

Texas Instruments (TI) is a well-known US-based semiconductor manufacturer. TI is perhaps best

known to many as the manufacturer of some of the fanciest scientific calculators in the market. Of the

long list of electronic devices produced by TI, microcontrollers are on the top. TI manufactures some

of the coolest and advanced microcontrollers of the market today. There are several categories of

micros from TI. These include general purpose low power MCUs which mainly comprise of MSP430s,

ARMs like TM4Cs, MSP432s, etc, micros for wireless communications like CC2xxx series, ARM + DSP

micros, DSP-specialized micros like the TMS32xxx series and so on. It will look as if TI is committed

toward mixed signal microcontrollers that are engineered for highly sophisticated industrial

challenges. This issue will cover an insight of value-line MSP430 general purpose micros.

MSP430s are not seen as much as the popular 8051s, PICs and AVRs. In most of the Asian market, for

example, MSP430s are rare when compared to other microcontrollers and even still rare when

compared to other chips produced by TI itself. I don’t know why there is such an imbalance. Perhaps

one big reason is its inclination towards low power consumption and limited resources. Low-power

means that these MCUs are crafted for special low power applications unlike most other micros.

Secondly TI micros are a bit expensive than other micros. Despites these, TI has provided some great

tools for making things simple. You can get your hands on some cool MSP430 chips through some

affordable Launchpad boards and still it worth every penny learning MSP430s. Firstly, it is a family of

ultra-low power high performance 16-bit (16-bit data bus) micros which are unlike the popular 8-bit

platforms. Secondly MSP430s have highly rich internal hardware peripherals that are second to none.

For instance, MSP430s can be operated over a wide voltage and frequency ranges. Another great

feature that is less common in most 8-bit micros is the DMA controller. Fortunately, MSP430s possess

this. Probably it is your first such micro family that is somewhere between 8-bit and 32-bit micros. In

the end, MSP430s will surely give you a taste of absolute American technology and concepts.

The MSP430 Family

Shown below is the family tree of MSP430 series microcontrollers from TI.

The most common MSP430 micros are the MSP430FR series, MSP430F series, MSP430G series and

the newly introduced MSP432 series.

MSP430FR series micros mainly feature high reliability, high endurance, 10-year data retention non-

volatile FRAM (ferroelectric random-access memory) memories. This series offer 16-bit solutions for

ultra-low-power sensing and system management in areas like smart building management systems,

smart grids, military and industrial designs. They feature the lowest standby power consumption of

about 350 nA with RTC, 100 µA/MHz active power consumption and the unique ability to save and

instantly restore system state right after power failures.

MSP432 series micros are the perfect combinations of MSP430 low-power portfolio with advanced

mixed-signal features and the high-performance processing capabilities of 32-bit ARM M4F engine.

These micros have high measurement precisions and contain high performance peripherals like high

resolution differential ADCs, DMA, IOT connectivity, etc. This series fills the gap between 16-bit

MSP430s and 32-bit ARM architecture and as of this moment this series is the most recent

development in the MSP430 family.

CC430 series is a small series of MSP430s with almost all features one can find in a typical MSP430

micro and embedded sub-GHz radio transceievers. They are well-stuffed true System-on-Chip (SOC)

solutions that remove the necessity of additional off-board wireless solutions.

Yet another tiny series of MSP430 micros include MSP430Cxx and MSP430Lxx micros. These micros

are intended for extreme low voltage (0.9 –1.65V) operations. With just one Nickel Cadmium (NiCd)

battery it is possible to run any micro of this series. They feature low resolution analogue frontends

and low pin counts.

The only series that is left to be discussed is the general purpose MSP430s series microcontrollers. By

general purpose, it is meant that these micros can be use in almost any scenario. It is this series of

micros that we will be dealing here. The table below summarizes this family:

For now, don’t struggle to understand the abbreviations of this table. You’ll eventually know about

them as we proceed.

Note that there are some other MSP430 devices that are not accounted here. These devices are either

rare or subset of the mentioned families. If you want to know more about MSP430s then you can read

the following Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430.

Launchpad Boards and BoosterPacks

Launchpad boards are affordable MSP430 evaluation kits. For just few dollars, you can have your own

Launchpad boards. They are so cheap that an average school-going student can afford one with

his/her own pocket money. However, this cheapness doesn’t compromise quality nor performance.

They are more-or-less alike Arduino boards in terms of board size and on-board resources except they

don’t share same pin naming conventions and board layouts. Well that’s not a big issue. However, it

would have been better if the Launchpads shared Arduino-like form factor. This would have enabled

using Arduino shields with Launchpads. TI has, however, its own brand of shields called BoosterPacks

and they seem to like promoting their own idea, owing to which there’s still no official TI Launchpad

that share exactly Arduino form-factor/shape. It is a very aggressive marketing boldness. Shown below

is the BOOSTXL-EDUMKII BoosterPack. It is just like Arduino Esplora with lots of on-board sensors and

devices except for the MCU. It is good for game development and sensor applications. There are other

useful BoosterPacks dedicated for capacitive touch, displays and so on.

Launchpad boards are not the only development boards offered by TI. There are many other dev

boards too. Shown below is the TI MSP-EXP430F5438 Bluetooth platform development board.

However due to cheapness and relatively good availability Launchpad boards are by far most popular,

particularly the MSP-EXP430G2 Experimenter’s Launchpad board.

This board comes boxed with two micros –MSP430G2452 and MSP430G2553. Both of these mixed-

signal MCUs come in PDIP packages. We can take them off from the board and use them in bread

boards, strip boards, PCBs, etc. Shown below is the layout of a MSP-EXP430G2 Launchpad board.

Just like any other evaluation kit, every Launchpad comes embedded with user LEDs, buttons, I/O port

headers (also known as BoosterPack connectors), onboard power supply, USB-to-serial converter and

programming interfaces.

MSP430s are ultra-low power 16-bit general purpose microcontrollers. A MSP430 micro consists of a

16-bit RISC CPU, wide variety of feature-rich peripherals and a flexible clock system all under the hood

of a von-Neumann architecture. Because of their ultra-low energy consumption profile, MSP430s are

well-suited for battery/solar powered/limited or renewable energy applications.

MSP430G2452 and MSP430G2553 are both almost identical in terms of hardware peripherals and pin

count. MSP430G2553 has some additional hardware features like more RAM-ROM memories, timers

and USCI-based hardware interfaces for LIN and IrDA communications.

Shown below is a comparison table of some common MSP430 chips usually found with Launchpad

boards.

Other Launchpad boards contain other chips but fortunately they share the same pin layout and so

they are fully pin compatible. The fourteen pin parts and twenty pin parts share the same pin layout

as shown below:

Though the pin names are labelled properly on the silkscreens of the boards, it is sometimes necessary

to check the schematic for details. Shown below is the basic schematic of a MSP-EXP430G2 Launchpad.

From the schematic, we can see what has been placed on the board by default. Parts labelled DNP are

not placed on a fresh Launchpad board. These have been left for the users.

If these don’t matter much and you need something simpler, then there are Arduino-like pin maps for

Launchpads. Though they are made for Energia IDE, they are useful for quick overviews.

Hardware

We will obviously need a MSP430 Launchpad board. For this tutorial, I used MSP-EXP430G2 Launchpad

board with MSP430G2553 and MSP430G2452 microcontrollers.

Apart from the Launchpad board, we will need basic tools like a digital multimeter (DMM), wires or

jumper cables, a power bank and other stuffs typically available in an Arduino starter kit like the

RIASpire one shown below.

An additional external or off board programmer/debugger is not needed since MSP430 Launchpad

boards come with on board Spy-Bi-Wire (SBW) programming/debugging interface. This interface

utilizes pins labelled TEST and RST apart from power pins and so only four wires are needed. Note

reset pin should be externally pulled up. Check the diagram below.

Similarly, we don’t need to buy/use any external USB-serial converter for serial communication as the

boards come with onboard hardware for this communication.

In all Launchpad boards, there are headers with jumpers as shown below to separate onboard

programmer from the target. This allows us to use a Launchpad board as standalone programmer. We

can also detach it. The top dotted line marks the border between the target and the programmer.

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