Texas Instruments MSP430 ultra-low powered MCU Project

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1 Texas Instruments MSP430 ultra-low powered MCU Project

Texas Instruments MSP430 ultra-low powered MCU Project

The TI MSP430 have been some of TI's best selling MCUs for a while. They are extremely low power (run 10 years on a single button cell battery!) and powerful at the same time. They are also really small and have a ton of different configurations to support anything from multiple channels of analog IO to LCD drivers and everything else you can think of. The other really nice thing about the MSP430 line is that they development tools are extremely cheap for this product. Rather than needing a full blown JTAG programmer, they provide a USB powered Spy Bi-Wire programmer which supports inline debugging while using very little memory and resources to do so.

I've done some small stuff like sample the temperature sensor and turn on and off the LED when the temperature hits a certain threshold on these, but haven't done much else. They would be ideal as a component to a larger system. They are also powerful enough to run certain electronics by themselves, such as a HVAC Thermostat or a Motion Detector (as seen in the Design Contest below).

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