Do you have an application needed to measure the flow or levels of fluids, well you are in luck check out the Texas Instruments MSP430FR600x family released in March with the MSP430FR6005, which you can find at https://www.ti.com/product/MSP430FR6005. This new family of MPUs combines all the cool features of the MSP430FRxxxx products with digital and analog interfaces specifically designed for ultrasonic sensors, see the USS in Figure 1.
Combining sensors with their core MSP430FR features of low power, high computation accelerator (LEA) and my favorite feature 256 Kbytes of FRAM should make this processor very attractive in any water metering application. TI as usual has provided top of the class tools and development support to make this all happen so I expect many designers will be considering this.
The MSP430 power consumption while not the clearly dominate in that area as they use to be are still very respectable at 120uA/MHz while running and you have a host of standby and shutdown modes of operation that can get your product into the nano ampere range, which will be critical for this sort of application. In addition, you have lots of code and data space with the FRAM and more then enough horse power to control a modem to report data from a remote station.
In addition to the new ultrasonic sensor interfaces it continues to provide LCD and lots of IO options to along with encryption hardware which will be increasing required to secure all the remote data streams. TI claims the accelerator is 40x faster then an ARM Cortex-M0+ core and even mention that in the datasheet, so I presume they are feeling some pressure from all the ARM Cortex-M0+ MPUs on the market. It would make for an interesting comparison to verify if this claim is true, perhaps in a nice little side project we’ll answer that question.
If you want to try out this new processor it looks to be about $5 price range (so its not going in a $20 meter) but I don’t see a dev board available yet. You can try out the USS interface using other devices such as the MSP430FR6047 evaluation module ($249 USD) at:
https://www.ti.com/tool/EVM430-FR6047 Long term the MSP430 appears to still be well positioned to take advantage of the explosion in IOT applications that we are experiencing and should continue to be a main player for the foresee able future. Next week we’ll look at a recent NXP offering and do a quick comparison.
Cheers!