On Dec 16, 2010, at 1:54 PM, Bob Blick wrote:

> All for $4.30 delivered!

It's just a (rather substantial) free sample with a nominal charge =20
attached.  Frankly I would have been more impressed if it looked like =20
it had actually been designed to minimize costs, and maybe farmed out =20
to multiple manufacturers.  As is, TI made a substantial number of =20
enemies by taking MONTHS to ship to a lot of people, with an ordering =20
system not really designed to keep track of orders (which they also =20
changed shortly after introducing the launchpad, leaving many people =20
unable to find their order status at all.)  (I ordered two on 27-Jul =20
and got them 24-Sep)

That said, the MSP430 is a sweet architecture, and these chips have =20
really good debugging capabilities for a less-than-$1 micro.  The TI =20
development environment is Eclipse based and not awful (?), and there =20
is some Nth party support (gcc, programming tools, etc) for non-=20
windows operating systems.

I can't figure out how they managed to sell 80000+ boards without =20
developing a more active community, though.  TI forum: sparse.  Google =20
group: rather quiet.  MSP430 yahoo group: reasonably active but not =20
much about the LaunchPad.  They aspired to appeal to the Arduino crowd =20
and have failed rather miserably, except for the price.

In general, I really like the direction TI has gone in with low-cost =20
evaluation tools.  The Launchpad probably went too far, but there are =20
a lot of sub-$50 tools that are pretty neat, and reasonably useful for =20
evaluation...

BillW

--=20
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