On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:03 AM, William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > TI made a similar decision with their low-end MSP430 chips; the first > MSP430s release in DIP form were well into the product-line > lifecycle. =A0Since there have been followons since, I guess it hasn't > been seen as an internal disaster. (The infamous LaunchPad would have > been cheaper (to manufacture) if the target CPU had been SMT...) TI is clearly trying to break into the hobbyist market with the G2 chips in DIP and the Launchpad. I think they have achieved a fair degree of success, but only a fraction of the potential. The MSP430 is an absolutely wonderful architecture to work with -- modern enough to be easy to use (having none of the legacy headaches associated with 8-bit PICs) and without the complexity associated with 32 bit MCUs -- yet you would never know this from the marketing materials. The LaunchPad is clearly aimed at the Arduino, yet lacking the simple cross-platform IDE and easy-to-use libraries (not to mention all of the add-on hardware support libs) the learning curve is still quite steep. I have a suspicion that an unfortunately large number of LaunchPads wind up collecting dust in the back of a drawer or shelf, but that is absolutely no fault of the hardware whatsoever. -p. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .