[Chris Hulbert] is making it easy for Arduino users to program MSP430 chips with a header file that allows you to compile Arduino sketches for the Launchpad. This makes sense, as the growing number of Arduino sketches available, and the low cost of the TI Launchpad make for a good bedfellows. It’s really wasn’t that hard to make this happen, although you’re not going to find support for all of the Arduino functions just yet.

At the time of writing, [Chris] has just 51 lines of code committed to the project. It provides macros for setup(), loop(), delay(), pinMode(), pinBit(), digitalWrite(), and digitalRead(). You’ll notice that one of the most important parts of the header file is that it disables the watchdog timer for the user (a stumbling block for many MSP430 beginners). It’s an interesting solution, but to be truly useful we’d want to see hardware integration with the Arduino IDE. That, as well as the rest of the Arduino functions are at the tips of your fingers. Get coding and submit your push requests to [Chris] for inclusion in his repository.

[Thanks Chris]

When I was on TI's website today checking out the MSP430 microcontroller series chips, I also discovered another cool product they have. It's a wristwatch with built-in RF transceiver based on their one family of microcontrollers (CC430 RF SoC Series). It is called the EZ430-Chronos. This is full featured sports watch with time keeping, 3-axis accelerometer, pressure sensor and temperature sensor. The watch can easily communicate with other wireless sensors around it that are transmitting in the same frequency. The watch kit comes with two USB interface module. One for wireless connection to the watch to set time etc. or collect accelerometer and other sensor data on the pc. The other interface is to reprogram the watch if you want. The kit also comes with tools to disassemble the watch for reprogramming. There is a wiki page for more information at:
http://www.ti.com/chronoswiki

I believe it will be definite attraction for techsavy people out there.

Today I bumped into TI's website about their recently released embedded development kit targeted towards hobbyists. It is called the LaunchPad. The kit is priced at only $4.30 and TI's store will ship it free if ordered from there. You can also order it from their distribution partners, but with shipping cost. However, one of the distribution partner, Arrow Electronics is offering free shipping till the end of July for any orders. So you can order it there as well for free shipping. Here are the few features of the microcontrollers that comes with the kit.

Features

• Low Supply Voltage Range 1.8 V to 3.6 V
• Ultralow Power Consumption
  • Active Mode: 220 µA at 1 MHz, 2.2 V
  • Standby Mode: 0.5 µA
  • Off Mode (RAM Retention): 0.1 µA
• Five Power-Saving Modes
• Ultrafast Wake-Up From Standby Mode in Less Than 1 µs
• 16-Bit RISC Architecture, 62.5 ns Instruction Cycle Time
• Basic Clock Module Configurations:
  • Internal Frequencies up to 16 MHz With One Calibrated Frequency
  • Internal Very Low Power LF Oscillator
  • 32-kHz Crystal
  • External Digital Clock Source
• 16-Bit Timer_A With Two Capture/Compare Registers
• Universal Serial Interface (USI) Supporting SPI and I2C (See Table 1)
• Brownout Detector
• 10-Bit 200-ksps A/D Converter With Internal Reference, Sample-and-Hold,
  and Autoscan (See Table 1)
• Serial Onboard Programming, No External Programming Voltage Needed
  Programmable Code Protection by Security Fuse
• On-Chip Emulation Logic With Spy-Bi-Wire Interface

The kit comes with the followings:

For more information please visit their wiki site at: http://www.ti.com/launchpadwiki