MSP430 LaunchPad Capacitive Touch Booster pack offer

[koogar]

Hey guys

Just thought i would give you the heads up on the MSP430 Launchpad Booster pack offer at the same great deal as the Launchpad $4.30 shipped  £2.60 in old money

looks like Ti are taking this abit more seriously now if only they used Arduino sheild compatability

Capacitive Touch BoosterPack (430BOOST-SENSE1)

The Capacitive Touch BoosterPack is a complete hardware and software reference design for implementing touch sensing capabilities using an MSP430G2xx Value Line microcontroller device! The plugin board features a capacitive touch button, scroll wheel and proximity sensor. This BoosterPack fully demonstrates the benefits of the MSP430G2xx2/G2xx3's Capacitive Touch Sense I/O ports, which allows touch sensors to be directly connected to the MSP430 without any external components! This minimizes physical footprint and bill of materials.

http://e2e.ti.com/group/msp430launchpad/b/boosterpacks/default.aspx

Regards

koogar

PS: Dave  i just spend 3 days watching all your EEVblogs on my freshly hacked Apple TV2 great stuff !!!

[Bored@Work]

Remind me, Launchpad was that thing that you could order from TI, and half a year later TI might start feeling like actually shipping one to you, adding horrendous shipping costs to non US customers?

Of course this was mitigated by TI preferring US orders. So as an international orderer you were relieved of having to think about shipping costs for maybe even nine month in total.

And you now recommend that people should waste another nine month of their lives to hunt for that booster pack?

[TheDirty]

Well, that's fairly dramatic.

Yes, launchpad launch (no pun intended) was terrible both organizational and supply, but they've pretty much caught up now, with delays being minimal.  I ordered one a couple weeks ago and it came within 2 days.  Not overseas international, though.  I proceeded to brick it using the TI firmware update.

[metalphreak]

My launchpads came pretty quick. Shipping was free to Australia. Shipping was free for these capacitive touch booster packs as well.

[baljemmett]

My launchpads came pretty quick. Shipping was free to Australia. Shipping was free for these capacitive touch booster packs as well.

It appears to be free on at least some other things too -- not sure how far it extends, but the RF2500 development kit I was looking at shows up as free shipping too.  Some of the error messages the site spits out could do with improvement, though; I had a rather embarrassing exchange with their support folk when I managed to block my order with card details that turned out to be duff...

I finally ordered the touch pack yesterday afternoon, got an e-mail this morning claiming an expected ship date of Tuesday.  Oddly the order status page claims it's shipped but the tracking number listed is for a 2 tonne shipment from Singapore to Utrecht...  We'll see what happens!

(I think I was amongst the lucky ones with the Launchpad; ordered June 23rd, got a backorder notice the following day and shipped (free) on July 20th.  Considering it was just for S&Gs and they surely couldn't even have covered the cost of shipping for $4.30, eh, not going to complain.)

[Strube09]

Has anyone done anything interesting with their launch pad?

I have seen a few hello world stuff, but nothing too involved. I would like to see this used more than we are with the Arduinos!

Strube

[TheDirty]

My plan is to convert my 4 digit 7-seg LED display which displays data from a UEGO sensor to the 20 pin valueline device and make it open source.  That way people that don't know much about microcontrollers can just buy the launchpad and the 20pin chip with the other minimal parts and be able to put it all together and program it for cheap.  It means that the people that want to develop for it and the people that just want to put it together are all buying the same product and it's not expensive.

[koogar]

Remind me, Launchpad was that thing that you could order from TI, and half a year later TI might start feeling like actually shipping one to you, adding horrendous shipping costs to non US customers?

Of course this was mitigated by TI preferring US orders. So as an international orderer you were relieved of having to think about shipping costs for maybe even nine month in total.

And you now recommend that people should waste another nine month of their lives to hunt for that booster pack?

I dont see anywhere that i had recommended them just that there was an offer and i would not want anyone interested to miss out
sorry if i wasted your time BoredAtWork i guess your wasting my time now by replying but hey !  

well i can only speak from my experience i got my first 2 launchpads last week took around 7 days to come to the UK with no extra costs. 2 boards cost me around £5.29 delivered then i saw the offer for the booster pack so i ordered 2 which are due out for shipping in 4 days at the same price .

Regards

Koogar

[Bored@Work]

Has anyone done anything interesting with their launch pad?

I have seen a few hello world stuff, but nothing too involved. I would like to see this used more than we are with the Arduinos!

Hackaday occasionally refers to Launchpad projects. They are typically of the form "blink a LED" or "tried to copy an Arduino project". And TI recently launched a Launchpad "blog" with a list of references to launchpad projects. Nothing to exciting. Mostly also the "blink a LED" type of projects.

On another note, I find it funny how people quickly come to the rescue of TI when I mentioned that the early launchpad adopters were badly screwed both ways by TI. The rather sad state of a Launchpad community is owned to this, and no "but I got my stuff within days now" will fix it. It is dead. But if you want to be fooled twice with this booster go ahead.

[TheDirty]

I should have mentioned you can try the four-three-oh forums for submitted projects.
http://www.43oh.com/forum/

On another note, I find it funny how people quickly come to the rescue of TI when I mentioned that the early launchpad adopters were badly screwed both ways by TI. The rather sad state of a Launchpad community is owned to this, and no "but I got my stuff within days now" will fix it. It is dead. But if you want to be fooled twice with this booster go ahead.

You seriously have your little pink panties in a wad over this.  You have a right to be mad about how they ineptly handled your order, but it's time to get over it and move on.

The Launchpad community wouldn't be any better if everything went perfectly smooth with shipping at the start.  Quite frankly it's nice and all, but it's severely limited due to the size of the chips.  It's nice to start out with, but doing anything even as advanced as most Arduino projects is just not possible.  Coupled with a standard C compiler and assembler rather than a simplified Arduino like IDE then the interest in it is going to be limited.

[johannes]

Hi,

the shipping via DHL Global has taken a week to Germany, pretty fast.

Johannes

[RABeng224]

It was good timing they released this because I just was tasked with making some cap touch buttons at work. I got it for $4.30 including shipping and it was at my desk in about a week straight from Singapore. I have been playing with it for a few days and it does what it is supposed to do. The cap touch library was easy to configure. Ti has two really nice app notes to help you navigate the cap library.  One major issue was my launchpad needed an emulator firmware update in order to debug the g2 chip that comes with the booster pack but it was easy to do, once I figured out what was going on. The largest problem with this setup is that the "booster" pack takes up all of the GPIO on the launchpad so you can't really do diddly when it comes to interfacing with anything. So, for the price it is a cool little demo board but not really practical for trying to incorporate into an existing design to test for feasibility.

Just my $0.02.

[Trigger]

I've only used the MSP430 a few times.  They can't really honestly claim it has the lowest power usage anymore as they've been matched or beaten by Atmel and Microchip.

I think the primary reason you don't see many MSP430 projects on Hackaday or other blogs is that it doesn't have a beginner friendly programming environment like the Arduino.  It's human nature to take the easiest route and the Arduino is pretty damn easy to use.

[alm]

I think the primary reason you don't see many MSP430 projects on Hackaday or other blogs is that it doesn't have a beginner friendly programming environment like the Arduino.  It's human nature to take the easiest route and the Arduino is pretty damn easy to use.

You do see plenty of PIC based projects, even though it doesn't have a real equivalent to the Arduino. There are some BASIC implementations like the PICAXE, BASIC Stamp and the Proton BASIC compiler, but I don't think either of them is as popular as the Arduino.

[TheDirty]

PIC has a large established hobby user base though, because of the Pickit and low cost IDE's.  Before the Spibywire programming interface, MSP430 has been one of those chips with a high buy in for new users.  It's only recently it's gotten on the low cost programmer/development environment bandwagon, which is a little late.

I don't think MSP430 ever went for lowest cost uC.  Their angle has always been low power.  PIC has some nice chips with low sleep currents, but I don't think they matched MSP430 in running power usage.