monsonite

SIMPL = Serial Interpreted Minimal Programming Language Hi, It's been about a year since I talked about SIMPL - a tiny language that allows you basic control of a microcontroller using serial commands. In the 6 months I have coded it up in MSP430 assembly language to make it super compact - and fast - with high level commands taking about 1uS to execute on the virtual machine interpreter. SIMPL is based on a jump table - so for any single, printable ascii character, the jump table will act on it and execute whatever function you choose to write. This technique gives amaz

Hi All, Would there be sufficient interest in some of the new FRAM parts to warrant an update of Energia to support these? The $16 MSP430FR5994 LaunchPad is remarkable value, and an ideal platform for datalogger/low power sensor applications with 256Kbytes of FRAM, a microSD card, and 68 lines of I/O. The MSP430FR2433 is also a neat little part, and if you need 4 x 24bit ADCs for instrumentation or energy monitoring the MSP430i2041 is one of the cheapest solutions for independent 24 bit ADCs around. I would be interested to know if there is a plan for Energia to support these r

Hi All, It's about a month since my last update, and following on from the breadboard prototype, the project has been gathering momentum. After an initial review of the various MSP430 devices it was decided to opt for a generic smart analogue sensor design, capable of driving an OLED display. I selected to use the MSP430i2041 ( which was chosen for it's 4 x SD24 ADCs) in order to make precision sensor measurements. It uses a low noise differential input instrumentation amplifier. Typically it can be used for bridge sensors, current shunts, milliohm measurements, strain-gauges

noForth appears to be a very nice implementation - written by Dutch developers, Albert Nijhof & Willem Ouwerkerk It is a good implementation for the MSP430 - especially if you are working with G2 Launchpad , '5739 EXP or '5969 EXP. noForth also supports the following boards with noForth C or noForth V - which has support for the FRAM Documentation about the boards (.pdf) Lp, Mc, Du, Mv, Ex intel hex files (.a43) of actual noForth versions (160401) MSP430G2553 Launchpad 16kB FROM Lp noForth C noForth V noForth C- noForth V-

One month later - and I have the MSP430i2041 running my Simplex code - reading a strain gauge loadcell and measuring force through the 24bit ADC. Here's the prototype on a breadboard. The MSP430i2041 is mounted on the "Schmartboard" carrier, and the 8 pin chip to the left is a 128K x 8 SRAM - Microchip 23LC1024 The MSP430i2041 has 4 separate 24bit SD-ADC channels with built in programmable gain amplifiers with differential inputs. Ideal for strain-gauge type sensors - with almost no external components needed for interfacing. You can have UART to PC and SPI and a couple of

Over the last couple of days Matthias Koch has ported his Mecrisp MSP430 Forth 2.03 across to my MSP430FR2433 ChipStick design. I am now happy to report that the first testing happened earlier this evening - so now we have a good native assembly language Forth running on the ChipStick. There will be an update to my GitHub - in the next couple of days. Ken

Hi All, I am aware of the limitations of the BSL, and the power of the Mass Erase function. I am suggesting that BSL is a convenient way of getting your initial code into the device - in my case an image of Forth or Simplex. Once this code is in place you have a device that runs an interpreted language, with it's own mechanism for programming code into the FRAM. Perhaps I should have made this clearer in my post. Ken

I got interested in the BSL bootloader about 6 weeks ago whilst trying to find a programming solution for a product at my work. I have done a bit of research and written it up as a 2 part post on my blog: Part 1 http://sustburbia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/the-great-msp430-bootloader-swindle.html Part 2 http://sustburbia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-great-msp430-bootloader-swindle.html If you want to program an MSP430 but don't want to have to use a FET based device, then this could be what you are looking for. My programmer? Sure - that's it on the left hand end of

Thanks Rando I am trying to get some documentation together - that is more easily followed. Start off with Ward Cunningham's Txtzyme website - which explains the basics. It should be a fairly simple port to the 16Fxxxx https://github.com/WardCunningham/Txtzyme I just built on his foundations. His <100 line interpreter code is still at the heart of my implementation. My interest started 3 years ago - http://sustburbia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/simpl-simple-programming-language-based.html Ken BTW I now have it running on 4 different MSP430 chips (G2533

I have put the pictorial construction guide for ChipStick on my Blog. It gives an idea of how to assemble the pcb by hand - should you wish. However - these will be professionally built by pick and place machine in China later in the Summer, at a price that would be difficult to match by any means. http://sustburbia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/building-chipstick-construction-guide.html The EagleCAD files, Gerbers and a representative, (but not finalised) BOM is also available from my GitHub repository. You will be amazed how cheap components are, when sourced from China - litera

An Update, I have now partially built up a batch of 14 ChipSticks, and completed 4. The remainder will be done during the week. Over the weekend I have written some more code to exercise the on board 128K byte RAM - and this appears to be working well. I can now execute my Simplex code out of the external SRAM. There will be an update to the code on my Github plus some more information geaned whilst building these up. It's not often you get an uninterrupted 4 day stretch to work intensively on a project like this. I can return to work tomorrow - knowing that most of what

In this post I reveal the applications of the new product I have been working on this last month. ChipStick is a tiny, low cost ($10) 16 bit microcomputer based on the MSP430FR2433 attached to a PC via a USB cable. It comes with up to 256K bytes of non-volatile memory - uniquely using ferro-electric memory. It has up to 16 accessible GPIO lines - which include a mix of SPI, I2C, UART, Timer and ADC channels. ChipStick may be plugged into a breadboard or stripboard and act as an intelligent programmable controller interfacing with other circuitry. ChipStick can also act as

I'd tackle point 3 first. Sometimes you find that half the chip is not powered if you omit connecting a power pin - I read something of this nature in the datasheet or user's manual last week. Get you code to run first without the complications of LP modes - once it works at full speed - then you can add the niceties. Ken

I have been intrigued with Forth since I was at school in the early 80s. There has been a renewed interest in Forth as a lightweight language with lightweight development tools - especially in these days of open source , where there is a backlash against the huge IDE tool chains needed to develop and debug code - even on the smallest of microcontrollers. As part of my recent investigation of MSP430 I have found a number of free, open source Forth implementations - which may be worth a look. 1. Fast Forth by Jean Michel Thoorens https://gitlab.com/Jean-Michel/FastForthForMSP430fr5

Fred, It did actually start off at the other end of the board - which initially seemed a good idea at the time, but for tracking reasons, the SPI RAM needed to go there too - and in the end the RAM won the toss. With hindsight - it could be easily moved back again - now that all the traces are in place. Perhaps that's something for Issue 2. There are also 2 unused pins on the processor which could also be tracked out, a 24 pin DIL footprint might be a better overall size - allowing more features. This is a BSL programmer and comms interface - it is not a FET. If you want to do FE

Roadrunner, The programming section is detachable. The pcb is perforated with a line of 0.5mm holes so that the end section can be cut off - or snapped off. With the programming section detatched, you can then use a 1.27mm connector pair and plug it back into the other end of the board. In effect, every ChipStick comes with a free programmer and USB-Serial converter. In the underside view, above, you see the CH340G (about $0.40) it's 12MHz crystal and a couple of 22pF capacitors. On the topside is the 3V3 voltage regulator and some more decoupling capacitors (10uF, 1

David, Thanks for finding this. Very interesting Clearly they share a common ancestor. The language is more Forthlike than mine, and more structured - possibly not a bad thing. I'm not really a programmer! I'll need to check out in full later. Ken I suspect he hasn't got 20 of these in his armoury though.....

OK I started on the build this evening - should get this flashing a LED before sunrise. And I did! - code loaded by SBW, Uart connected, SIMPL running & LED flashing by 2am! Ken

The pcbs arrived from my supplier today. Here's some rather grainy photos showing top and bottom sides against a millimeter rule. More photos later when I start to populate the board. Ken

I think this new '2133 chip is targeted at smoke alarm applications. The TIA is just what is needed to convert the nano-amps from the ionisation chamber into a detectable change of voltage. At $0.60 in 1000off it's clearly aimed at high volume disposable products. I think you could just about run a Forth in 3.75K of FRAM Today I have just started looking at the MSP430i2041 which has 4 x 24 SD ADCs - aimed at 3 phase electricity metering applications. It's only $1.20 in 1000+ and makes the ideal smart analogue front end for loadcells, strain gauges, pressure sensors, altime

Here's an interview with Ward Cunningham, from Portland OR - who developed the first Wiki - almost exactly 21 years ago. (March 25th 1995) He is also the creator of Txtzyme which was the inspiration for SIMPL. http://portlandcreatives.co/portfolio/ward-cunningham/ Ken

Henk Sorry about the delay. I have now moved the SIMPL Wiki to my GitHub space You can view it here https://github.com/monsonite/SIMPL/wiki There have been some formatting issues when I transferred the files over which I still need to sort out. Also the project files are slowly being added to the repository https://github.com/monsonite/SIMPL regards Ken

@@jazz talks about mailbox in posts #72 and #73 http://forum.43oh.com/topic/2972-sbw-msp430f550x-based-programmer/?p=53730

Hi Jazz Your UART benchmark tests are most useful - thanks for sharing http://forum.43oh.com/topic/3413-msp430-uart-benchmark/ I found some interesting code by Rick Kimball - for low end MSP430 equipped with USI such as the the F2013 and the G2452 https://gist.github.com/RickKimball/1254043 By using software to add a start bit and stop bit to the output data of the USI shift register and setting the shift length to 10 - it is possible to transmit something that is like asynchronous uart data Rick states that the baudrate will be the same as the USI clock - so that co

Hi Spirilis, Most of the FRAM parts have 2x USCI A and 1 x USCI B. This allows you to use USCI A0 for your uart PC comms, USCI B0 for your SPI external memory which leaves USCI A1 for communicating with any other device you wish. Of course you can put multiple devices on a SPI bus - but I thought that to maintain memory bandwidth it was better to only put local memory devices on bus B. In theory - if you did have an array of these nano-processors - they could share memory devices - and as you only have 3 lines to handle - making a dual port memory from a serial device is fa