How are you all?

[spirilis 1,264]

HI folks-

Old time forum member here, but been away from the microcontroller hobby for a few years... sold my old house, moved to a rental for a year, now finally in a new "permanent" house for hopefully a long time.  The basement is an utter mess but I have all my electronics parts, soldering equipment, an entire bin dedicated to TI launchpads, stored in my crawlspace (w/ dehumidifier) for when I clean up this mess of a basement & set up my new workbench.

So what's everyone working on these days?

[Rei Vilo 692]

Nice to see you back!

I've terminated the embedXcode project (it is now under LTS). I'm switching away from Apple and transitioning to Debian.

Many projects on IoT and displays, as usual, and starting to investigate AI with edge computing.

[spirilis 1,264]

1 hour ago, Rei Vilo said:

Nice to see you back!

I've terminated the embedXcode project (it is now under LTS). I'm switching away from Apple and transitioning to Debian.

Many projects on IoT and displays, as usual, and starting to investigate AI with edge computing.

AI and edge?  That sounds fancy... what kind of edge hardware?

[bluehash 1,581]

Hello!

Looks like a nice space to spread your stuff.

The last year was tough, but got through it. All my work is at home now, no active side projects... however I'm going to pick up an old powerwheels jeep for cheap and fix it up for my kid's birthday 😀

[spirilis 1,264]

7 hours ago, bluehash said:

Hello!

Looks like a nice space to spread your stuff.

The last year was tough, but got through it. All my work is at home now, no active side projects... however I'm going to pick up an old powerwheels jeep for cheap and fix it up for my kid's birthday 😀

Ha that is cool!  I guess one side project I need to pick up "at some point" (code phrase for "sometime next century if I'm still alive") is DIY electrification of our bicycles.  My son especially needs some motorized motivation... we moved to an area that's quite hilly!

[spirilis 1,264]

Finally getting back into it.  No workbench yet, but I start a 4-week sabbatical after next week, so one task on my plate is to revamp the basement with new shelving + bigger work from home office & workbench.

In the meantime, I noticed the older TI SimpleLink hardware seems to be deprecated - the latest SimpleLink SDKs no longer support them & it halts with PG1.x hardware (requires PG2.0+).  So I threw all those launchpads away.  I guess I'm getting old or maybe wise enough to realize when something isn't worth the effort...

So my focus now is the MSP430FR2433 - the Value-Line FRAM launchpad and chip.  I'm just using CCS and the TI cl430 compiler, no more GCC for me.  Keeping it simple & fun, and as focused as possible.  I think that's the best way to roll, having too many options really distracts one and prevents you from really accomplishing personally rewarding stuff, so I'm narrowing my processor down.

I was considering the FR2355, which I have a launchpad for as well - more pins & fancier peripherals.  But I kept thinking, you know, I'm never going to use all that stuff and it's probably wiser to (re-)start smaller.

Compared to the original value-line chips, the MSP430FR2433 is pretty nice.  eUSCI_A0, A1, and B0 - 16KB FRAM and *4KB* SRAM - Not too shabby.  Even has a (quite laughably basic) RTC peripheral.  Available in some tiny packages should I ever build my own gadgets without the launchpad.

Only thing I don't see in its hardware setup is Capacitive sensing support like the old G2553 had, where you set the PxSEL bits a certain way... I'll have to look deeper though.  That was a cool feature of the G2553.