Andre,

I've been down this road recently (early this year). First, let me say
I'm a Microchip Registered Consultant and have about 20 years
experience developing embedded micro applications. I've developed
applications for Motorola, Rockwell, Zilog, Atmel, Rabbit, Microchip
and (starting this year) TI MSP430. I'd say 50% of my designs are PICs,
and lately I've been using Rabbit (for larger memory footprint and
TCP/IP networking) and MSP430 (for battery powered apps) quite a bit
also. For the past 10 years or so, I've primarily developed in C with
assembler as needed. This has allowed me to accumulate a large number
of "stock" library routines I port back and forth quite freely between
projects regardless of the MPU chosen. This lets me hit the ground
running and choose whichever chip really fits the application best.

My first MSP430 project was with the MSP430F435 and was a design
conversion from a PIC16C926. It's a battery powered industrial
flow/temperature meter and is powered by a single 3.6V lithium cell.
The original PIC code was written in C and included CCP, A/D, port bit
interrupt (for wakeup) and LCD drive.

The design conversion was extremely successful -- we increased battery
life by almost 4x, more than doubled program and data memory, gained
flash ISP capability, added serial comms with hardware UART, added two
PWM analog outputs and eliminated a serial EEPROM chip -- all for the
same cost. Needless to say, the client was very happy.

In all, I really like the MSP430 family. The development tools are high
quality and inexpensive and the chip is very nice to program. Having a
16-bit CPU makes a lot of math functions much easier and faster,
although I'd say the speed of the PIC and MSP430 family are similar
(with an edge to PICs in the 20MHz+ range). But no PIC can even come
close to the MSP430 family for battery powered applications.

It took me about a week to study the MSP430 family and convert the
hardware design. It took me about a week to convert the code from the
PIC to MSP430 and about another week to add the new features we "got
for free". TI has excellent documentation, although their style is
decidedly different than Microchip. TI seems to spread their
information out across many documents, but it's all their -- sometimes
you just have to search for a while. TI also has lots of sample
assembler and C code examples for all their peripherals. These helped
me immensely. There is also a very active MSP430 Yahoo egroup, much
like the PIClist.

My suggestion to you is to purchase one of the TI Kickstart kits if you
are seriously considering developing for the MSP430 family. They are
inexpensive (about $99) and include a target board with a couple CPU's,
a FET (JTAG debugger and emulation pod) and the complete IAR C-
Compiler/Assembler/IDE/Debugger toolkit. The C compiler is limited to
4K code, but there are some excellent 3rd party tools out there. I use
Quadravox's AQ430 toolset and I believe it cost $395 for a package
equivalent to IAR's much more expensive tools. Very high quality!
Compiler/Assembler/Debugger. Imagecraft and Rowley Associates also make
excellent toolsets.

Olimex also sells inexpensive, but high quality MSP430 FET pods and
prototype boards.

I'd go for that MSP430 job, if it comes your way. If you can handle the
PIC, you can handle the MSP430. It's always good to expand your
knowledge and paying work is always good ... ;-)

That's about it. If you have any specific questions, feel free to
contact me off list.

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 12:06:01 -0800, Andre Abelian wrote:
> HI to all engineer,
>
> Suppose one of you worked on pic over 7 years and got
> Bunch of projects done asm or C now there is contract
> Job offer instead of using pic is MSP430F149 by TI how
> Would you respond are you ready to work with TI micro
> Or you are beginner for TI micro and you shouldn't
> Even go close to it. After searching for Job 2 months
> I couldn't find any company that uses pic micro.
> How would you know if TI part is better then pic
> Should I start looking at Ti, or cypress micro or
> Atmel. My question is how would you manage all this when it comes
> To look for new job? Most companies are saying yaa you
> Have good experience on pic but sorry we do not use pic.
> I look at TI micro it has 2 hardware UART, JTAG etc
> This guys are not even using an emulator JTAG does the
> Job. I do not know any feedback?

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