Hello there!
I couldn't find a place for an introduction, but I guess this is as good a place as any, right?
I'm Dan, I've had an interest in everything electronic since I was a little kid.
I've built several simple electronics, like headphone amps and whatnot, but never really got into the dirty parts of designing something special.
I'm also just getting into micro-controllers and I've been playing around with the MSP430 chips a little, and trying to learn C programming.
Which, I guess does bring me to the project I had in mind to really get involved with this setup... I'm the kind of person that learns by breaking stuff and making it work again. So, this is probably the kind of project that's way over my head, but I know I'll learn a lot from re-doing it several times

In that, I have questions about the real capabilities of the MSP430 chips and how to get the most out of them.
My plan is to take a Big Mouth Billy Bass and.. tweak it a bit..
Simular to this:
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So, this is an ARM9 controller.. and these little kits (mbed) are quite expensive.. Hence, wanting to use the MSP430. Anyway, the people that did this at one point had the fish set up so it would read twitter messages sent to it on a live stream.
So, I want to try to do this. I have the fish, I have a Launchpad for programming the MSP430, I have two "free samples" of I
think (I don't remember) of
MSP430G2452 chips and a
Cirrus CS8900A Ethernet controller, which TI mentions in their documentation as working well with the MSP430 chips.
I'm worried that the controller won't be powerful enough to do everything the fish needs. I'm wondering if I could use two together to get all of the functions. One controlling the network interface and stuff involved with that then the other controlling the robotics of the fish.
I'm pretty sure this is what the controller is going to have to do:
* 3 servos (mouth, body, tail. Recycle controllers from the fish)
* Analog audio output (probably recycle bits of the fish here too)
* Read configuration, coordination, replies, and sound bites from an SD card
* Be connected to the network (Ethernet and DHCP) and receive Twitter updates, possibly post them as well
* Text to speech (maybe?)
* (optional) web page for web-based configuration
I know the thing isn't going to have enough flash memory for everything, but I'm curious if there's a way to put executables for it onto the SD card. I know I'm at least going to have to put configuration and sound bites on it.
What I want in the end is someone to be able to sent a twitter message to @hackbass and have the fish read it aloud with tail and body movements.
If its something common like "Hello @hackbass" or "how are you @hackbass" it can reply appropriately. And/Or, also post occasional status updates like "@hackbass is cold" if it's cold in my shed or "Its dark in here" if the light for the camera goes out.
My hope is to have the fish be a stand-alone unit. All it would need is power and Ethernet and it would do its thing. (Optionally, could have a web interface so you could change what twitter account it uses if so desired... wouldn't need that except for a production/kit thing though).
Eventually, this would be on a live video stream on hackbass.com

So, that's my project for the summer.. Some input from MSP430 experts is greatly appreciated...