Wow! It’s hard to believe that LaunchPad turns five years old today! It seems like just yesterday, we released the original MSP430™ LaunchPad for $4.30. Let’s take some time today to look back on everything we’ve accomplished, as well as have a few laughs.
Five years ago the LaunchPad team was a lot younger and still developing our personas. I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of re-watching the original LaunchPad unboxing video Adrian did:
I’ve had my share of screen time too! I remember back to when I released the original C2000™ LaunchPad and I had the crazy idea of developing a purposefully cheesy infomercial for the LaunchPad. While I think some people misunderstood the video, I still chuckle every time I watch it.
In all seriousness though, LaunchPad has really revolutionized electronics prototyping for professionals, hobbyists, students and everyone in between. What started as an idea for a low-cost development board has become a complete ecosystem of hardware, software, connectivity, and production solutions. We have LaunchPads that can wirelessly communicate with the cloud and others that can spin huge motors at unheard of efficiencies.
In addition to all the amazing hardware tools, we’ve developed some equally amazing software tools that make prototyping your application easy! A little over three years ago, a humble TI Field Applications Engineer had an idea for a way to revolutionize the way users interact with LaunchPad. It was with this idea that Energia was born. Energia brings the Wiring application programming interface (API) to the LaunchPad. Instead of having to read countless manuals and datasheets, users now interact with their LaunchPad with highly abstracted, easy to use APIs. More recently, Energia has made giant leaps forward by also making it easy to develop Internet of Things (IoT) applications as well as integrating a real-time operating system.
Even more recently, TI announced their cloud-based tools. These cloud-based tools build on Energia by bringing that same easy-to-use programming environment to the web. Now instead of having to download Energia to a desktop, users can go to dev.ti.com to start programming their LaunchPad.
It’s truly amazing to see what everyone has built using our TI technology. The passion that our community shows inspires us to continue to create tools that enable you as a developer to solve the world’s problems. Today there are 17 LaunchPads and over 75 BoosterPacks that you can use to solve unique problems.
With that, I’m proud to announce the 18th LaunchPad in the family, the C2000 Delfino™ F28377S LaunchPad!
This LaunchPad is a POWER HOUSE of performance and incorporates all of the latest and greatest IP from the C2000 microcontroller (MCU) team! The device runs at 200MHz, is floating point, has accelerators for Viterbi, complex math, CRC, and trigonometric operations, and on top of it all has an independently-programmable coprocessor that also runs at 200MHz. That’s 400 MIPS of performance in the palm of your hand! Because it runs so fast, you’ll of course need more memory to store your program. This device includes a Megabyte of flash as well as 164 Kilobytes of RAM. As with all C2000 LaunchPads, the new Delfino LaunchPad includes an electrically isolated debugger to help make debugging high-power, real-time control applications easy. My favorite part is that we’ve been able to keep the price incredibly low. You can purchase this new LaunchPad from the TI Store for only $29.99.
What have you designed with LaunchPad over the past five years? Be sure to share your projects with us!
