Fred

I just got some $20 target boards from an eBay seller that I mentioned here - a TS430PW28A, RGC64USB and RGC64A. The QFN ZIF sockets are a work of engineering art. He also threw in a v1.6 Wolverine Launchpad. I guess I'll get some more QFN soldering practice replacing the XMS430FR5969 with production silicon.

@@kodi Yes. It worked fine.

Some nice progress @@chicken, but... err... that soldering could do with a little work.

@@kodi That might be a good idea. I reflects badly on TI even though I'm sure the problem is not theirs. Does anyone know a good person to contact?

@@bobnova The quadrature is definitely right because I've just decoded what is in the examples. The difference between the examples I've found is just how the Q6 and Q7 interrupts are used. They tend to be used to flag a single rotation or an error, but I suppose can be used however you want. My single pulse version works but could perhaps be simpler. All I've done is ignore two of the possible quadrature states. If I could make any sense of the 3 sensor one I could probably simplify this.

Aaaaarrrrggh! I wish I hadn't. This just confuses me. It seems that you can switch the PSM to use a 3-bit input rather than 2-bit input, by clearing ESIV2SEL. That seems OK. However, attempting to decode the PSM table for this is just not making any sense. I'm now worried that I may have oversimplified things earlier and got it working more by luck than understanding. The family user guide (slau367e) is definitely not helping.

@@cde Those sound like excellent reasons. I should have realised from your post count and reputation that you'd thought it through and made a sensible decision, rather than some newbie who hadn't noticed they could be disconnected.

I'm not sure you've quite got the concepts of driving a stepper. (You might have, but without seeing the code I can't be sure.) By far the easiest way to drive a stepper is to use a stepper motor driver. A common example is Pololu's A4988 board. You drive this by setting the direction and sending a pulse to the step pin to make it move one step. I've had a Tiva Launchpad driving some of these without a problem. I could probably dig out some sample code if needed.

Alternative to what? Would TI's ez430-rf2500t do what you need? Olimex do a few MSP430 boards which might be suitable, especially if you're in Europe.

@@cde Always good to get something working and sometimes speed is better than perfection, but why not ditch the ezFET part and just use the target board? The F2013 will run just fine from 2xAA. No regulator required. You can even get battery packs that fit straight onto the 0.5" pitch connector. (The similar ez430-rf2500 came with some.)

OK. Some progress on the Processing State Machine part of things. In all the examples I've seen the PSM is programmed by inserting a mysterious arrays of 16 hex digits. That's just so helpful! Here's an example from the simple quadrature encoder example msp430fr69xx_esif_01.c const unsigned char psmTable[] = { 0x00, 0x03, 0x0C, 0x49, 0x00, 0x01, 0x48, 0x09, 0X00, 0X41, 0X08, 0X09, 0X40, 0X01, 0X08, 0x09 }; Well, by just the addition of a couple of definitions for those bit flags and it's a little clearer. If the states go 0,1,3,2 then it counts up. 0,2,3,1 c

@abcedarian Interesting. A bug where reflow temperatures might erase the FRAM contents perhaps?

A few of us now have the MSP-FET - mainly thanks to TI's ESI project. The target boards are great if you want to prototype something quickly and need to use a device that's only in a SMT package. However they're quite enpensive for hobbyist use. I thought it worth mentioning that I found a US eBay seller hrojas with some target boards for $20 each. He even did me a deal on international shipping as I bought a few. He's got the following: TS430PW28A, TS430RGC64USB, TS430PZ100B, TS430PS24, TS430L092, TS430RGC64C I also noticed that the target boards listed a while ago with TI deals on them

@@PTB It was a pleasure. Glad you like it.

Congratulations. I'm sure the Hackaday effect helped get you over the line, not that it looked in any danger. I decided to jump in too.

That look really nice. I'm part way through my own reflow controller, but I've got so many things on that maybe I'll skip it, go for one of yours and get on with something else instead. I'll check it out more thoroughly before jumping in. Your timescales are very optimistic. Funding on 9th November and first deliveries in November. Is that realistic?

Making them run towards vibration would be much more fun when you have screaming kids running around your porch to get away from them.

We've already been discussing it (well - more the microcontroller on it) here.

Let's not get into a discussion about religion. I'll get frustrated. You'll get offended. Everyone else will be bored. We believe different things. Let's just leave it at that.

On my opinion, it's far more sensible to throw the bible away.

@@KatiePier Interesting info, thank you. I'm surprised that there's no matching IR receive logic. Obviously it can all be done without a specific peripheral, but I'd have though both sides would be there. It's a shame about the different pinouts. If there was a standard for each package it might be tempting to get one or two of the target boards, but if they only support a small range of devices they're just too expensive to justify. Not a big deal for corporate customers I suppose, but difficult for the hobbyist.

@@nickn Once you get over an initial fear of SMD, you try it and don't want to go back. There are always breakout boards or (if you are willing to pay a fair premium for convenience) the MSP-TS430 target boards. Unfortunately not all LQFP64 devices can use the same target board. There is a LQFP 64 board but the new FR4xxx isn't listed as compatible. It might be that it's too new, but it's probably that the power and debug pins are in a different place.

The first part of the ESI I've looked at is the Processing State Machine. The best explanation seems to be in section 4.7 of slaa639 which explains the LC base quadrature encoder example. It's particularly good at showing how to create the PSM table from your state machine design (4.7.2). The PSM is also explained is section 28.2.8.3 of the slau367e but I don't think it's done as clearly. Note that if you're looking at both the LC design and the MSP430Ware quadrature example, these do things slightly differently. For instance the LC one uses Q6 and Q7 interrupts and the MSP430Ware one do

This is fairly hard going. I assume from the fact that there's not been much from the other ESI projects, that everyone else is taking time to get to grips with this. I think I'll do a bit of blogging as I go. Maybe my small steps might prove interesting or useful. The first thing I did was to get my existing interrupt and TimerA based code running on the FR6989. No problems there. As I mentioned, I'm really impressed by the EnergyTrace++ features. It just makes you want to see how low you can go - even if you don't really need to. My project is mains powered but I still wanted to get it d

Is it worth using a raw LCD for hobby use? I can see there might be cost savings if you're producing 1000s of your design, but considering how cheap and easy to use modules with built-in controllers are it doesn't make much sense - except for the challenge of course! I'm trying not to just buy every dev kit because they look fun to play with. I have too many already. I'll hold off as long as I can...