MSP432 launchpad

I think that Texas Instruments MSP430 family is really nice low-power MCU for all kinds of projects. After finding out that TI has released new MSP432 chip, which has Cortex-M4 CPU, I had to order the launchpad board as soon as it was available. After receiving boards a few days ago, I have been experimenting with Pico]OS Cortex-M port on those boards.

MCU has similar peripherals as older 16-bit MSP430 family, also documentation is similar so it was easy to get started with it. I usually like to use Eclipse CDT with MCU work, but I figured that it might be easiest to use TI CCS for starters (as it was unclear to me if OpenOCD would work with this board).

I had some problems with board resetting after I loaded by application into it, but that turned out to be the WDT resetting the chip because it took too long before execution hit “main” (which would have disabled the watchdog). I got this fixed by disabling watchdog very early in Reset_Handler.

I now have Pico]OS running on the board, along with serial console provided with eUSCI peripheral. I ended up in using MSP432 driverlib (BSD licensed version), which also contains CMSIS headers (which is really nice as it made working with existing code much easier).

I still have to work with LPM3 (or DEEPSLEEP in arm terminology). I tried to implement Pico]OS clock tick by WDT, but doesn’t want to keep running reliably in LPM3 mode.

There is a simple blinky example at github.