Dave,

Rob Severson (here on PIClist) has mentioned the MSP430 series a couple of
times, once in response to a question of mine regarding low power and
flexible clock options I needed for a project. I looked into them and got
the flash emulation kit (MSP-FET430X110 I think...) for $49 direct from TI,
which is a fabulous deal. Comes with everything you need to develop/burn
software for their flash chips including a slick development software set
that does Assembler and C (though the C compiler is a limited version that
compiles up to 1kb of generated code...still very nice). There is very
little outside information about these chips, but if you look at the TI
website, there's plenty of (quite well written) documentation, several
sample applications, and a lot of useful tidbits of code for various maths,
I/O (I2C, UART, SPI.....), etc.

I have now used both the MSP430F1101 and MSP430F1121 flash devices with
beautiful results. I can keep an RTC going in software and wake up every
once in a while to process data at 1MHz or so on an internal RC Osc (tuned
using the 32kHz watch crystal as a solid reference), and I use about 1-2 uA
in doze mode, or 0.4 mA when fully active at 1 MHz. Very low power, to say
the least! Hell, I can put the thing to sleep at 0.1 uA and it'll come to
life from an interrupt in < 6 uS to full active state...

I also like the instruction set. Very clean, lots of addressing modes to
play with, and ends up making my code a lot more human friendly than my PIC
code for most tasks. Plus I can run on the full clock speed rather than
clk/4, though some instructions do take a couple or three cycles to
complete. Remember that if you run the 430 at 5 Mhz with a crystal, that's
pretty much like running a PIC at 20 MHz, so they're really on par with the
PIC speed-wise.

I can also fiddle with all sorts of clock modes that divide down and use
either the crystal or the onboard RC. I can even change which source the
CPU uses on the fly, so if I need to process data with time accuracy I can
switch the CPU to the xtal and then back to the RC for fast, regular code.
Cool. Very cool.

If you can't tell yet, I love these chips. And the price is right: I can
get the 4kb FLASH F1121 for about $3-4 or better in *ones*. At 10000 pcs,
the F1101 (1 kb flash) is supposed to be $0.99 each. That's with 16 i/o
lines, ADC, UART, flash reprogrammable, in-circuit reprogrammable, blah
blah blah, and it's a 16-bit uC rather than 8-bit. Beat that Microchip.
Availability is not great but Arrow, Allied, Rochester, Wyle and even
Digikey have in-stock a few varieties, and lead times don't appear to be
too bad for others, at least for the 1101 and 1121 that I've tried. I think
(hope) this will get better...

Don't get me wrong...the PIC is really nice for a lot of things, but I'm
discovering the MSP430 is often even nicer.

By the way, thanks Rob for pointing me toward the 430...well worth it. Do
you use them??

Kris Wilk
ReefNet Inc.
www.reefnet.on.ca

At 10:43 AM 10/13/00, you wrote:
>Hi,
>     Has anyone had any experience with the MSP430F112 or MSP430F149 micros?.
>They look interesting.  Low power. OK speed.  12 bit A/D.
>Has anyone actually bought any?  If so, how much are they and where did
>you get
>them?
>I'm looking for a lower power micro than the PIC.  Any info on the TI parts is
>appreciated.
>
>Regards,
>Dave
>
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