How to create a new world with MSP430™ MCU? Massive resources to help you get started easily!

Let's imagine a design that reduces the number of analog components and reduces the size of the board. With this design, you can tailor functionality to a specific application and optimize for performance, power, size, and cost. Now, a simple MSP430 ™ MCU can do all of these things. Let's look at new applications that the MSP430™ MCU might have in various designs.

You can use MSP430™ MCUs to offload many important system-level functions and reduce design complexity. Using an MSP430™ MCU as a general-purpose (or auxiliary) MCU means that it can handle multiple system-level functions, such as input/output expansion, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and LED control, which can reduce board space and design costs. You can learn how to implement simple analog or digital functions in various applications in the MSP General-Purpose MCU Training Series below .

The use of MSP430™ MCUs allows for smaller printed circuit board layouts, scalable range sensing, and efficient resolution sampling with low noise. This makes them ideal for a variety of building automation applications, such as pyroelectric infrared sensors (PIR), smoke detectors (as shown in Figure 1), and thermostats.

Figure 1: MSP430 ™ MCUs enable sensing in low-power building automation applications

There are many types of sensors on the market, such as electrochemical sensors (oxygen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide), which require different types of signal integration. The ultra-low power consumption of MSP430™ MCU can extend the battery life of these systems. MSP430™ also has an integrated programmable gain amplifier (PGA) and multiplexed interfaces for gas detectors. In addition, MSP430™ MCU also comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) where you can configure and connect comparators, PGAs, and ADCs for quick evaluation.

From buttons in elevators to volume controls in in-car entertainment systems to central displays in smart homes, more and more customers require quick responses to touch gestures. Figure 2 is an example of an automotive touch screen. These applications all use capacitive touch technology. Capacitive touch technology has low power consumption and good electromagnetic compatibility and noise immunity, which can meet the requirements of these applications.

MSP430™ MCUs make it easy to design capacitive touch solutions with an easy-to-use ecosystem that includes evaluation modules, software, and a GUI with code generation to help you in the entire design process from prototype to production. Check out the "Lite Capacitive Touch Handbook" to quickly start your design.

Figure 2: Example of a car touch screen

Does your system require a device that can measure the flow rate of liquids or gases or detect objects? Ultrasonic sensing MCUs enable water and gas flow measurement, or use ultrasonic technology to detect objects in a room. MSP430™ MCUs have unique waveform capture technology that uses high-speed ADC and cross-correlation methods to achieve high-precision measurements at low power consumption. Build your next water flow measurement system, coffee machine, or ventilator with our MSP Academy; MSP Academy can give you a better understanding of ultrasonic sensing technology and help you set up a test evaluation environment in less than an hour.

E-bikes, battery monitors, and power tools require highly reliable battery management solutions to ensure longer battery life. MSP430™ MCUs can be used as the main controller to communicate with the battery monitor.

From digital peripherals such as 16-bit timers with capture and compare capabilities, universal asynchronous receiver/transmitters, serial peripheral interface and I2C to analog peripherals such as 10- to 12-bit successive approximation register ADCs, digital-to-analog converters, operational amplifiers and LCDs, the MSP430™ MCU family offers a broad and low-cost portfolio to help address today’s growing and diverse MCU design challenges.

With the rich ecosystem of MSP430™ MCU, you can easily evaluate MSP430 ™ MCU and accelerate the design of each module no matter what application you encounter. Get a fresh understanding of MSP430™ MCU through our step-by-step training videos, GUI, LaunchPad™ development kits and software examples. First, use the MSP430F42433 LaunchPad development kit to develop and configure your various application designs (these applications can be realized with a simple MCU). Refer to the Chinese video tutorial below to start your design now!

For more online technical support, please visit the TI E2E Chinese support forum (e2echina.ti.com).