A month or so ago, Texas Instruments announced that they were releasing a new "development board" for their new "Value Line" MSP430G microcontroller chips. The board is pretty simple, but sells for only $4.30, making it accessible to hobbyists and students as well as industry pros. The design is to be completely open source (like beagleboard) and while TI has not said so explicitly that I've heard, it's pretty clear that this is at least partially an attempt to capture some of the excitement that the Arduino has created in its communities. (Freescale has a similar and more expensive effort in similar directions with its "Tower" systems.)
Will TI be able to do so? They're shipping out LOTS of these LaunchPad boards to all sorts of people. But as far as I can tell, its being paired with a (couple of) traditional "professional" IDEs for writing software, and the usual standard libraries. I don't think that will grab all the attention. I thought it might be fun, educational, and perhaps useful if I were to try to develop the core Arduino SW library for MSP430 to sort of help things along. It's my intent in this blog to keep track of what I've done (and how that part worked out), what I'm doing (and what problems I'm having doing it), and so on...
