I was looking for suitable microprocessor development board to show case some aspects of embedded firmware techniques, and as luck would have it, I had a number of candidates. A had a couple TI MSP340 based boards and a few NXP KL family boards along with a random collection of Raspberry Pi and Beaglebones. I wanted to start with something smaller and less capable to better represent our target system, later we’ll return to larger embedded systems using Linux and other operating systems. I settled on the MSP340FR6989 Launchpad as shown in Figure 1.
The FR6989 processor is larger than many microprocessors used in embedded products but its large enough if we want to put a kernel in we could and it also has lots of IO and cool LCD screen and buttons we can make easy to demo apps with. It also provides 128Kbytes of FRAM which is really nice compared to using flash and at the same time, like most MSP340 processors has really good low power capabilities, which we also can demonstrate. TI documentation is generally good and the board is commonly available from the usual part sources like Digikey or Mouser.
The goal will be to setup a Code Composer environment and demo some simple code first, then we can build out our discussion for timers, BFL vs kernels, debugging technics, low power and more. Should be fun so stick around.
Cheers!