New goodies in the space 1

MSP430 LaunchPad

2x MSP430 Value Line LaunchPad Development Tool from TI.

This is a low cost (around €5) development board for TI low cost and low energy MSP430 microcontrollers.

There is an interesting web site 430h specialized in MSP430 hacking.

But be cautious! This is not an Arduino! It is more like an ATtiny. Still somewhat very useful.

Do you always wanted to have a chicken coop but you always have been held back by a small fact that you’ll have to wake up every morning to open the coop door so nice chickens could get outside do begin with their everyday business?

Your dream may become true! Well, at least after you build a LaunchPad controlled chicken coop door controller. You could also make your chickens more happy by providing a simple TV broadcasting service for them.

So better start hacking because spring is not far away!

eZ430-Chronos

1x eZ430-Chronos Development Tool from TI.

Old days of boring old only time telling wrist watches are over!

They are so over! This is a wireless (did I say wireless?) clock with an accelerometer and a pressure sensor!

Now you can know what is your altitude and if your hand is moving or not – just have a look at the watch!

Well, it actually does not sound very useful… Yes, I forgot, or maybe you figured it out by yourselves – you could reprogramm it into a flying mouse.

MSP-EXP430FR5739

1x MSP-EXP430FR5739 FRAM Experimenter’s Board from TI.

FRAM is non-volatile memory with high write endurance (100 000 000 000 000 cycles).

Have you thought that 100 000 erase write cycles is a way too limiting for your project? Maybe you want to save the value and the day say in every second?

Little calculation shows that you would ruin that lovely EEPROM of your microcontroller in less than few days or months when you consider to sacrifice more precious memory addresses for your small selfish value.

These days of paranoia and fear are finally over – now you can even save your value after every millisecond and you still could do that for mere 3 next millenias. Is’nt it amazing?

IM-ME

2x IM-ME from Girltech … yes, from outside its really looks like that usage of this toy pager is really limited to young female members of our society.

Well, read the packaging again but carefully. It says “Outstanding Value!”. And it is true!

The truth is that it’s actually a CC1110F32 development platform from TI.

Well, at least after some tiny soldering job.  Here‘s a good list by the lovely London Hackspace about available resources to give you an idea of all the possibilities.

Yes, this is like a wireless platform like the ez430 chronos, but around a different chip and there are many wonders you could do with this hidden gem. How about spectrum analyzer?

STM8S-DISCOVERY

1x STM8S-DISCOVERY from ST. This is a low cost (around €10), low energy microcontroller development board from ST.

This is a Black Peter of this list. It is actually a good boy. When you look at the specification sheet then it looks very much like an Arduino, a 8-bit CPU, 32 KB Flash, 2 KB RAM, 1 KB EEPROM.

Unfortunatelly it has not catched that much traction. Go figure!

STM32 Value line discovery

1x STM32 Value line discovery from ST.

This is another brain child, I mean a development board from ST but with this one they got more lucky.

It maybe that it always helps when you use nice ladies to promote your product or it might be that it is a 32 bit ARM board for €10 actually.

It is from the same microcontroller family about what Kenn was so excited when he opened his PS3 Move.  Of course this chip is even less powerful with its 24MHz CPU, 8 kB RAM and 128 kB of flash memory but it is still a step towards right direction.

You could build robots out of it. Or flying robots. Did I mention robots? Well, I hope you are starting to get the picture.

You can get more information from here and here.