Interfacing MSP430F47197 to PC

Just a bit more info... 

I'm trying to open the USB as a serial port using MATLAB.

I'm sorry if my questions/doubts seem dumb, but I'm a beginner so please help!!

Sagar

 

sagar shah said:

The target board that I'm using is MSP-TS430PZ100A.

THis board is just a breakout board and has no (usable) peripheral circuitry for interfacing with the PC. The JTAG port is for programming only and does not allow (at least not on normal ways) communication between PC and MSP (the only way is by setting hardware breakpoints into the loaded applicaiton and peeking/poking values from/into ram - that's how some debuggers simulate a console).

What do you need? You need an USB/serial converter to provide a serial port ont he MSp side and a virtual serial port through USB on the PC side.

Then you need a level shifter (e.g. MAX232 series) for converting the serial voltage levels (-+12V) to TTL level (VCC/0V) which is use don the MSP side. If you're lucky, the USB/serial device has such a converter internally and you can disable and skip it (form the USB controller, the signals are already in TTL format).

Then connect the TTL signals (whether from your own level shifter or directly form the SUB controlle routput before converted into RS232 voltage levels) to the two RX and TX pins of the MSPs UART module.

Last step is writing code that programs the UART for the proper baudrate and send/receive the data.

There are some MSPs (the 55xx series) which have an internal USB controller and enumerate on the PC as virtual serial port. Still some programming is needed for communication.

I'm providing Vcc from the MSP430-FET debugger and keeping it connected while performing the communication from MSP to PC. 

So I was wondering if I can use the ez430 usb-debugger to provide the uart to USB-serial connection for my purpose?

I've the code from the example scripts for setting up the baudrate and send/receiving the data, which i think should suffice...

sagar shah said:

So I was wondering if I can use the ez430 usb-debugger to provide the uart to USB-serial connection for my purpose?

Nes (or Yo?). The FET and it's connection to the MSP isn't meant to provide a data link to the PC.

What you can do is sending JTAG commands to the FET using the MSP430.dll. These commands may set breakpoints in the code and e.g. fetch a data byte (e.g. the function parameter of a sendbyte function) when the breakpoint is hit. IAR does it this way for its virtual console. However, this is a complex and slooooow process, not suited for realtime applicaitons - and it requires the FET always attached.

sagar shah said:

I've the code from the example scripts for setting up the baudrate and send/receiving the data, which i think should suffice...

But this code is for a serial connection with a serial PC port. Like I described. It doesn't work through the FET.

For transferring data, I was actually referring to the EZ430U chronos debugger that TI provides with the chronos watches and not the FET debugger ...

The ez430U chronos debugger has uart Rx/Tx pins available which, according to the documentation, " allows the user to transfer serial data to a terminal window at a fixed rate of 9600 bps with no flow control"..