Recently I realized most of my projects were all Arduino-based. There are lots of other prototyping platforms available in the market, and the TI LaunchPad, based on the MSP430 is one of them. In fact, I have had one of these boards sitting in my box of stuff ever since they came out. At $5, they because an impulse purchase when I was buying some other stuff.
So, I dusted off the original box and recorded opening it up. Let’s see how it works.
One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s developers, Rob Bishop, is heading out on a Hackerspace tour in the US. Looks like he’ll be visiting a couple of spaces on the west coast, east coast, and my home town: Austin, TX.
Renesas is offering a promotion version of their RL78 microcontroller. This offer is only available to their Sample Component account holders, but the process for signing up for a sample account is pretty straightforward. (There may be EAR restrictions with this board.)
If you are looking for a powerful processor that is an alternative to PIC or AVR processors, this board might be worth a look.
[i]Note: It appears samplecomponents.com might have been compromised at some point in the past. Google throws a warning page up. Proceed at your own discretion.[/i]Renesas Promotion Board for RL78/G13 | Renesas Electronics America.
While the Arduino Project Team provides their official Arduino forums, sometimes real-time help is just a bit better. When that is the case, I encourage you to visit the freenode.net IRC channel, #arduino. While as of today it is not an official channel, there are a number of great people available to help.
You can find me under the nick “baldengineer”, big surprise, I know. Others like kline, Yoston and pwillard are also excellent people to ping with questions.
When Serial data is transmitted to an Arduino, it is sent one byte at a time. Even though you might type “123” in the Serial Monitor, that’s not quite what is sent. Instead the bytes “1” then “2” then “3” are sent. Once received into a buffer on the Arduino, these individual bytes need to be reassembled into something useful.
