Experimenter board for low-power embedded designs

MSP430 experimenter's board enables quick development of ultra-low-power medical, industrial and consumer embedded systems using either a signal-chain-on-chip MSP430FG4618 or F2013 microcontroller.

Texas Instruments has announced the MSP430 experimenter's board (part number MSP-EXP430FG4618) which enables designers to quickly develop ultra-low-power medical, industrial and consumer embedded systems using either a highly integrated signal-chain-on-chip (SCoC) MSP430FG4618 or small 14-pin F2013 microcontroller.

Along with the two 16bit MSP430 devices, the board includes a TI (Chipcon) radio-frequency module connecter for developing low power wireless networks.

The board also has a number of input and output options such as a microphone, buzzer, liquid crystal display (LCD), capacitive touch-pad, push buttons, and pin board prototyping space, among others.

With two MSP430 MCUs, designers can easily develop a variety of low-power and battery-operated products including cost- and space-sensitive sensing applications like motion detectors, all the way to highly integrated applications like high-precision portable medical and industrial sensing.

The F2013 is a small 4 x 4mm, 14-pin device with a fully programmable clock system that provides wake-up from 500nA standby to full-speed operation in less than 1us.

The F2013 device also includes a 16bit sigma-delta analogue/digital convertor for high-precision sensing systems, 2Kbyte of Flash, 128byte of RAM and a basic serial communication interface (USI) which makes SPI and I2C implementations easy.

The FG4618 MCU includes 116Kbyte of Flash memory and includes the MSP430X core architecture with extended 1Mbyte memory model.

The extended memory access is suitable for today's larger system requirements and allows for the development of very sophisticated real-time applications, completely in modular C libraries.

Up to three operational amplifiers - to handle high precision instrumentation -coupled with the onboard 200Ksample/s 12bit analogue/digital convertor, 1us code-to-code settling time, 12bit digital-analogue convertor (DAC), and direct memory access controller (DMA) complete a signal-chain-on-chip (SCoC) system that reduces overall system cost and eliminates the need for external components.

Combined with the two devices is a host of interfaces and input/output options that allow a designer to quickly evaluate the suitability of either MSP430 MCU.

JTAG headers on the board make both devices accessible for programming and debugging as well as communication between the two MSP430s or to other external devices.

A variety of input options include a microphone, capacitive touch-pad, and push buttons.

Output peripherals include a buzzer, LCD, RS232 communication interface, and 3.5mm headphone jack for analogue output.

To accelerate the development of low power wireless RF systems, the experimenter's board includes connectors for various Chipcon evaluation modules, which cover the <1GHz and 2.4GHz frequency bands (including IEEE802.15.4/ZigBeeT standards).

Supported modules are the CC11x0, CC25x0 and the CC2420 evaluation kits, which are available separately.

The US $99 MSP430 experimenters board is available now from the TI eStore and requires a Flash emulation tool, available separately starting at $99 such as the MSP-FET430UIF.

Back to top