On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 7:22 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote: > That being said, it is a nice MCU family. I even considered to use it > for a project once, only to find out poor documentation about the > 16bit Sigma-Delta ADC and the true performance of the 16bit > Sigma-Delta is actually quite poor. TI admitted the document > deficiency at that time. I am actually looking at the SD16 ADC for a project right now. What performance problem did you have with it? Maybe I should plan to use an external ADC. The problem with the TI's USB programmer / debugger is the usb->serial chip they use, the tusb3410. This turkey needs a lot of external parts and it needs firmware downloaded to its 8051 microprocessor. It seems like Ubuntu manages to screw up the firmware download in a new way with every new release. Some hobbyists have produced a clone of the debugger using the superior FTDI usb->serial chip. (Google for "goodFET"). Now that there are MSP430s with integrated USB, maybe TI will migrate their PICkit-like ez430 to a single-chip design. A problem with the MSP430 is a general supply shortage right now. It doesn't seem like a good time to introduce a high-volume, low-cost version when they have difficulty keeping up with the supply now. Or maybe MSPs without analog peripherals can be produced at a different fab. There is a GCC4 port of the mspgcc toolchain at http://mspgcc4.sourceforge.net/. Development of mspgcc is rather fragmented. From reading the generated code, I would say that mspgcc does a better job then SDCC does for PICs. Regards, Mark markrages@gmail -- Mark Rages, Engineer Midwest Telecine LLC markrages@midwesttelecine.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist