eZ430-Chronos Development Tool Beginner Help

Personally, I don't think the Chronos is the right thing to start with for a beginner.
It does way to many new thing simultaneously.

For getting used to MCU programming in general and MSP programming in detail, the LaunchPad is by far the better thing to start with.

Anyway, there are many application notes and examples available on the TI site wich deal with specific aspects of the chronos and many more for basic MSP programming. The non-Chronos examples usually are written specifically for one type of MSP processor (and there are many different), but nevertheless a starting point.

IIRC, the Chronos contains a cc430F6137 processor, which differs a bit from other MSPs (the internal RF part).
I don't know which documentation came with the Chronos, but you surely need the CC430 family the users guide (slau259b.pdf) and the device datasheet.

There are no specific C++ commands. All you need is basic C knowledge (while C++ is possible, the use of objects and object-oriented programming usually leads to early exhaustion of the availabel resources, so it shoud only be used if really necessary and if experienced enough with limited-resource-programming).

The access ot the MSP hardware funcitons is granted through registers which appear to the programmer as normal global variables of volatile type. So no special instructions are needed here too.

There are, however, some compiler-specific intrinsics and mechanisms to do things that are not covered by the C language: Accessing the processor status register to enable or disable interrupts or enter/exit low-power modes, a special extension of the switch statement to turn it into a jumptable-based (optimized for the MSP interrupt vector registers) high-efficient code, and for defining interrupt handlers. Also, there are special keywords for putting constants and variables into dedicated memory locations, but that's rather advanced stuff.
All this depends on the compiler you use (CCS/CCE, IAR or mspgcc)

Hi,

I am working with chronos EZ 430 and needed some help. I have managed to creat a GUI to to collect the acceleration data and want to find the velocity and the position. But as I understand the accelerometer measures the acceleration and takes into account the acc due to gravity so how do I use a low pass filter to separate the two and intergrate to find velocity and then position?

Cheers,

Chi

Kuber Sethi said:

as I understand the accelerometer measures the acceleration and takes into account the acc due to gravity

You'll need to put the resulting data into a mathematical model that identifies the gravity vector from it and subtracts it so you only seeany other acceleration that might occur.
However, in free fall, the sensor will show you nothing (zero values for all three directions) despite the fact that you're accelerating with 1g towards earth. There's no way to determine whether you're falling upside down. Just the lack of acceleration indicates that you're either in free space or in free fall.