>Dave,
>
>Rob Severson (here on PIClist) has mentioned the MSP430 series a couple of
>times, once in response to a question of mine regarding low power and
>flexible clock options I needed for a project. I looked into them and got
>the flash emulation kit (MSP-FET430X110 I think...) for $49 direct from TI,
>which is a fabulous deal. Comes with everything you need to develop/burn
>software for their flash chips including a slick development software set
>that does Assembler and C (though the C compiler is a limited version that
>compiles up to 1kb of generated code...still very nice). There is very
>little outside information about these chips, but if you look at the TI
>website, there's plenty of (quite well written) documentation, several
>sample applications, and a lot of useful tidbits of code for various maths,
>I/O (I2C, UART, SPI.....), etc.
>
>I have now used both the MSP430F1101 and MSP430F1121 flash devices with
>beautiful results. I can keep an RTC going in software and wake up every
>once in a while to process data at 1MHz or so on an internal RC Osc (tuned
>using the 32kHz watch crystal as a solid reference), and I use about 1-2 uA
>in doze mode, or 0.4 mA when fully active at 1 MHz. Very low power, to say
>the least! Hell, I can put the thing to sleep at 0.1 uA and it'll come to
>life from an interrupt in < 6 uS to full active state...
>
>I also like the instruction set. Very clean, lots of addressing modes to
>play with, and ends up making my code a lot more human friendly than my PIC
>code for most tasks. Plus I can run on the full clock speed rather than
>clk/4, though some instructions do take a couple or three cycles to
>complete. Remember that if you run the 430 at 5 Mhz with a crystal, that's
>pretty much like running a PIC at 20 MHz, so they're really on par with the
>PIC speed-wise.
>
>I can also fiddle with all sorts of clock modes that divide down and use
>either the crystal or the onboard RC. I can even change which source the
>CPU uses on the fly, so if I need to process data with time accuracy I can
>switch the CPU to the xtal and then back to the RC for fast, regular code.
>Cool. Very cool.
>
>If you can't tell yet, I love these chips. And the price is right: I can
>get the 4kb FLASH F1121 for about $3-4 or better in *ones*. At 10000 pcs,
>the F1101 (1 kb flash) is supposed to be $0.99 each. That's with 16 i/o
>lines, ADC, UART, flash reprogrammable, in-circuit reprogrammable, blah
>blah blah, and it's a 16-bit uC rather than 8-bit. Beat that Microchip.
>Availability is not great but Arrow, Allied, Rochester, Wyle and even
>Digikey have in-stock a few varieties, and lead times don't appear to be
>too bad for others, at least for the 1101 and 1121 that I've tried. I think
>(hope) this will get better...
>
>Don't get me wrong...the PIC is really nice for a lot of things, but I'm
>discovering the MSP430 is often even nicer.
>
>By the way, thanks Rob for pointing me toward the 430...well worth it. Do
>you use them??
>
>Kris Wilk
>ReefNet Inc.
>
http://www.reefnet.on.ca
>
>At 10:43 AM 10/13/00, you wrote:
>>Hi,
>> Has anyone had any experience with the MSP430F112 or MSP430F149
mitvma.mit.edu
