MSP430 Serial Communications

Fun with the MSP430F2013.

I have been playing about with the MSP430F2013 for a couple of days now - and finding out what a wonderful little microcontroller it can be.

It really is short of both flash memory and RAM (2K and 128 bytes respectively) - so applications have to be very compact. However it makes up for these shortcomings with some very useful and flexible hardware.

My first application is to use it as a lower cost alternative to an AD7767 ADC which I currently use in a loadcell interface.

Although it does not have an on-chip 24 bit ADC, the output resolution of the SD_16 ADC should be sufficient for my immediate needs. This little $1.50 mcu already saves me $10 on not having to buy an AD7767 then service it with another mcu.

The second useful peripheral is the Universal Serial Interface (USI) - this is a flexible device used for both I2C and SPI communications, and as will be seen below later can also be used for high speed asynchronous uart communications too.

Using the USI

The universal serial interface is a flexible peripheral that is primarily intended to automate the processing of SPI and I2C communications. With a bit of bit-banging trickery - to add start and stop bits, it can also be used as a Transmit UART.  Rick Kimball has also experimented with high speed asynchronous serial from the USI - which is capable of a massive 16Mbaud - but I doubt anything much over 3Mbaud will be accepted over a FTDI cable!

By way of a test, I hacked together a quick routing to read the ADC and send its 16 bit sample to the USI.
At it's heart it has a variable length shift register which can shift a maximum of 16 bits. By adding in a start and stop bit, and setting the shift register length to 10 bits, the USI has no problem sending asynchronous serial data at up to 2Mbaud.

With potential serial at the processor full speed - SPI transfer at 16MHz should be possible - and it's definitely worth trying.

This will allow word length transfers to be made with the serial SRAM, and will be more efficient it setting up longer addresses.

The SRAM needs a 32 bit control packet to be sent prior to any transfer.  This consists of an 8 bit instruction followed by a 24 bit address.  The RAM handler code should be able to efficiently set this up and clock it out  to the SRAM as two consecutive 16 bit transfers. From there on it just emits clocks (dummy bytes) to accept the data bytes from the RAM. On long sequential transfers about 300Kbytes per second transfers should be possible.

MSPEZIO

This is a collection of useful I/O functions to make your programming life a whole lot easier. Written for physics students at the University of East Carolina. I quote:

This guide is intended to serve as a fast introduction to the use of the msp430x2xx embedded microcontroller for use by students in Electronics and Advanced Laboratory environments. The intent is to allow an easy access to calls for I/O applications and serial communications transmitting data to external computers. It is assumed that the student has some understanding of c-programming and has been through the introduction to using the Code Composer Studio or IAR Embedded Workbench Kickstart, IDE’s. 

16 Bit ADC

With code based on one of the mspezio examples, I was quickly able to get the SD16 ADC working and sending data out of a bit banged uart. MSPEZIO offers several examples that can be tried with CCS on the basic LaunchPad hardware.

The SD16 ADC is quite comprehensive - and the mspezio set-up made the initialisation of this peripheral a lot easier.  I was able to set it up to read a strain-gauge based loadcell and send readings to the PC terminal application.  The MSP430F2013 really only has just enough pins to allow a simple loadcell interface with serial comms.  The output of the ADC values can be triggered by sending any character over the serial comms   - using the mspezio WaitForSerial() function.

Much of the progress I have made with the MSP430 has been the result of evenings and weekends looking online at other code examples and good old experimentation.  By modern standards the MSP430 is not a complex microcontroller, requiring significantly less initialisation code to get the basics working.  I would recommend buying a Launch Pad to anyone who wants to tinker with something a bit different.  As stated in a previous post, the board is low cost and there is free access to the CCS Code Composer Studio compiler and also the Arduino like Energia IDE.  CCS offers multiple file projects to be built and debugged whilst Energia allows easy entry level to simple sketches.


SIMPL on MSP430F2013

The plan now is to get Energia working with the MSP430F2013 so as to allow a cut down version of SIMPL to be run on it.

Energia allows the SIMPL application to be built up a routine at a time - so that every last byte of precious code space can be efficiently used. This is very important on the '2013 - which only has 2K codespace and 128 bytes of RAM!

The biggest problem with the MSP430F2013 is that it does not have a proper uart peripheral and whilst uart transmit is possible using the USI module with a bit of  trickery, the uart receive function becomes a major challenge - involving either a timer controlled sampling of the incoming bit stream or something as yet unknown.

The porting of SIMPL and the MSPEZIO helper functions to the '2013 will be the subject of a forthcoming post.