Often times someone other than the firmware designer on a development team needs to program a TI MSP430 chip. An analog, apps, or test engineer, client; even an end user does not want to mess around with installing an entire IDE for a released firmware update. There are too many settings and parameters to worry about, in addition to a heavyweight program which may require a paid license to be installed.
Thankfully, a Binary file can be created by Code Composer Studio. A Binary file has everything a microcontroller needs to know in order to execute the program, and can be sent directly to the chip to be run. Usign this file, a small computer program called Lite FET-Pro430 by Elprotronic can use the MSP430 Launchpad hardware to program a chip without the user having to face a single line of code. It's easy, free, and best of all, leaves little room for error.
The video below shows how to create the Binary file and burn it to a chip. I'm basing this video on TI's excellent tutorial located here.
Steps:
- Setup CCS to output a binary file.
- Download and install Elprotronic's FET-Pro430 Lite software
- Open FET-Pro430 Lite
- Load the binary file created by CSS
- Define the MSP430 Group and the type of chip
- Press 'AUTO PROG.'
- Press 'RESET'
And you're done!
