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Doing Baugh's State Machines Book on the Cheap

Andrew Palm
Intellectual 370 points

Other Parts Discussed in Thread: MSP430F2274

Greetings.  After a long break from the MSP430 to study some analog electronics, I faced the task of getting back up to speed (admittedly slow in my case) and learning some more about low power embedded programming.  Although I was only about half way through the book by Davies I purchased Tom Baugh's "MSP430 State Machine Programming."  I'm now a little over half way through that book, and I'm very glad I got it.  Although Davies is good in many ways, Baugh's book shows how to use the state machine model to write very low power applications for the MSP430, and the code examples are frameworks for entire applications.  I have learned much from it.

The book uses a development board sold by SoftBaugh, model ES2274, which appears to be very useful and flexible for development with the MSP430F2274.  Unfortunately, as a hobbyist the price was a tad steep.  However, the 2274 can be programmed with Spy-Bi-Wire and I had a spare Launchpad on hand that could be used as a programmer, so I started looking for header boards for the 2274.  One is available from Olimex, model H2274.  It comes with a clock crystal and a JTAG header, too.  I built a little custom cable to connect the Launchpad to the header board, and I was in business.  (I could have just used four single pin jumpers, but I wanted to minimize the chance of misconnections.) 

The picture below shows the setup.  The smaller red rectangle on the breadboard is a SMT to DIP adapter board for a MAX3221CDBR RS232 line driver and receiver, which is part of the ES2274 board.  The adapter board is from Sparkfun.  A handful of small parts from my junkbox completes the setup.  The state machine book has schematics of the ES2274 which makes the connections easy to figure out.  The jumper on the header board is set to draw power from the JTAG connection to the Launchpad.

I know this is basic stuff, but I thought it might be useful to those interested in the Launchpad as a Spy-Bi-Wire programmer or those who are interested in Baugh's book but were hesitant to buy it because of the cost of the ES2274.

Best regards to all,

Andy Palm

  • Guru 58965 points

    Welcome back!

    Your project sounds fun and you can try the examples from the book without modification.

    I am also a hobbyist. I am playing the $29 FRAM evaluation board form TI. It is very similar to the LaunchPad but with more of everything. 1 KB RAM, 16 KB FRAM (instead of Flash), 5 Timer modules, Uart, I2C, SPI, ADC10, Analog comaraters, off-chip 3-D Accelerometer and NTC Thermistor.

    I am trying self-modifying-code, auto-adaptive-code, and stuff that a professional is not suppose to do ;)

    I may try to use state machine too.

    -- OCY

  • in reply to old_cow_yellow
    Intellectual 370 points

    Dear Old Yellow Cow, thanks so much for your reply, plus your earlier email.

    I have just a few chapters to go in Baugh's book.  I rewrote my Morse code keyer program as a state machine background task to try to reinforce some of the concepts.  It works, but only at slower speeds due to the foreground task overhead.  But it served its purpose. learning-wise.  The later chapters get more and more complicated, with lots of pointers to functions, and even pointers to function pointers.  But I'm getting used to some C things which were only fuzzy to me previously.

    I have a target project in mind, control of a Silicon Labs FM receiver chip, but I have a long path before I can take that up (and might end up using an Atmel AVR chip if the program gets too large).

    The FRAM thing looks interesting, with lots of features.  I'm sure you will do something truly cool with it.

    Thanks again and cheers!

    Andy

     

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