Sorry to drag up an old thread, but I only in the last few days I have actually fired up the MSP430 dev kit.
I'm getting a 24V pump to operate in conjunction with a photovoltaic solar panel to pump water through a solar heater panel for the pool.
The MSP430G2231 supplied in the kit is perfect for my needs as it has an inbuilt ADC, and it is not a ridiculously large micro for the job.
What have other people used it for, or are all these $4.30 dev kits now just languishing on the shelf?
My biggest hurdle was reliably sensing if the pump is running or not simply by observing the panel voltage.
Out of interest, I was playing with a (free) mBed just a week earlier, and my 12 year old son was able to do some things with that real easy. The MSP kit lost him real quick having to get right down to the nitty gritty of the chips registers.