A previously unpublished posting from February 9th that has launched me on a wonderful voyage of discovery of the MSP430 series of microcontrollers.
As Kennedy said in September 1962...
We choose to go to the Moon!
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win ...
But first we need a working Rocket!
We have an on-going project at work, which needs an MSP430 bootloading over it's serial port with a hex file. So we went out and bought the cheap open source, Rocket BSL programmer from Olimex.
I then found that I needed the drivers and other software from TI, which I had to register for and then declare to the US Government that I wasn't going to use it against America in any way, shape or form. So far, so good.
The MSP430-BSL is described as a joint project between Olimex and Texas Instruments. The reality is that no-one really wants to take ownership of it, and there is no one specific site that you can go to that gives you everything you need to get this programmer to work. It's like the code has been fragmented and spread to the four corners of the known cyber world - lest anyone dares try put the fragments together again and unleash the awesomeness of this great force on mankind. What I'm trying to say is that both Olimex and the Mighty TI have shot themselves in both feet, and it's no surprise that the MSP430 is languishing in some stagnant microcontroller cul-de-sac.
After mulling this over for a while, I began to think that proprietary bootloaders really suck. There should be a universal tool which allows you to squirt code from a hex file into any microcontroller, from any platform. And that got me thinking about the humble USB-serial programming cable - such as those by FTDI, SiLabs or our Chinese friends who make the CH340.
It also appears that others have had this thought. In my search for an alternative MSP430 programmer, I found this interesting approach from Flying Camp Design - a programmer that is literally not much more complicated than an FTDI cable - just an FT232R on a small pcb.
Bootloaders are usually designed to be small, and not particularly human-friendly, because they are normally talking to some proprietary application running on the pc. But this doesn't need to be the case, there is sufficient flash space in the boot block of most micros to put a more sophisticated bootloader program - one which is actually capable of running some interpreted commands and presenting a more human friendly face to the user.
As Kennedy said in September 1962...
We choose to go to the Moon!
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win ...
But first we need a working Rocket!
We have an on-going project at work, which needs an MSP430 bootloading over it's serial port with a hex file. So we went out and bought the cheap open source, Rocket BSL programmer from Olimex.
I then found that I needed the drivers and other software from TI, which I had to register for and then declare to the US Government that I wasn't going to use it against America in any way, shape or form. So far, so good.
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| North Korean? No, just Bulgarian. |
After mulling this over for a while, I began to think that proprietary bootloaders really suck. There should be a universal tool which allows you to squirt code from a hex file into any microcontroller, from any platform. And that got me thinking about the humble USB-serial programming cable - such as those by FTDI, SiLabs or our Chinese friends who make the CH340.
It also appears that others have had this thought. In my search for an alternative MSP430 programmer, I found this interesting approach from Flying Camp Design - a programmer that is literally not much more complicated than an FTDI cable - just an FT232R on a small pcb.
Bootloaders are usually designed to be small, and not particularly human-friendly, because they are normally talking to some proprietary application running on the pc. But this doesn't need to be the case, there is sufficient flash space in the boot block of most micros to put a more sophisticated bootloader program - one which is actually capable of running some interpreted commands and presenting a more human friendly face to the user.