Das Blinkenlights on the MSP430 Launchpad with Linux

TI’s MSP430 LaunchPad development kit offers some serious bang for the buck. You get two modern 16-bit microcontrollers, a programmer-cum-debugger with pins broken out and a USB cable for less than 5 USD inclusive of shipping. TI even provides two free (as in beer) IDE’s for Windows. Linux support though was a bit sketchy when the board was first released.

Things of course have greatly improved and getting the Launchpad to work with Linux is now a breeze. The versions of MSPGCC and MSPDebug in Ubuntu 11.10’s repositories seem to work just fine. There’s also functional Arduino fork for the MSP430 called Energia.