Where are you all located? Here in Northern Ohio, the drive would have=20
been clean, driver could have driven to door. :)

On 1/11/2011 3:32 PM, Charles Craft wrote:
> Ordered 3 from the TI online store on 12/17/2010.
> Got a shipping email on 01/03/2011 that they shipping (from Singapore).
> Received them today via FedEx.
> FedEx guy even walked up from the street (about 200m) because the
> driveway is a snowy, icy mess. :-)
>
> On 12/17/2010 1:37 AM, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
>   =20
>> On Dec 16, 2010, at 1:54 PM, Bob Blick wrote:
>>
>>
>>     =20
>>> All for $4.30 delivered!
>>>
>>>       =20
>> It's just a (rather substantial) free sample with a nominal charge
>> attached.  Frankly I would have been more impressed if it looked like
>> it had actually been designed to minimize costs, and maybe farmed out
>> to multiple manufacturers.  As is, TI made a substantial number of
>> enemies by taking MONTHS to ship to a lot of people, with an ordering
>> system not really designed to keep track of orders (which they also
>> changed shortly after introducing the launchpad, leaving many people
>> unable to find their order status at all.)  (I ordered two on 27-Jul
>> and got them 24-Sep)
>>
>> That said, the MSP430 is a sweet architecture, and these chips have
>> really good debugging capabilities for a less-than-$1 micro.  The TI
>> development environment is Eclipse based and not awful (?), and there
>> is some Nth party support (gcc, programming tools, etc) for non-
>> windows operating systems.
>>
>> I can't figure out how they managed to sell 80000+ boards without
>> developing a more active community, though.  TI forum: sparse.  Google
>> group: rather quiet.  MSP430 yahoo group: reasonably active but not
>> much about the LaunchPad.  They aspired to appeal to the Arduino crowd
>> and have failed rather miserably, except for the price.
>>
>> In general, I really like the direction TI has gone in with low-cost
>> evaluation tools.  The Launchpad probably went too far, but there are
>> a lot of sub-$50 tools that are pretty neat, and reasonably useful for
>> evaluation...
>>
>> BillW
>>
>>
>>     =20
>   =20
--=20
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