1.1 Problem Statement The objective of this project is to design a completely functional and powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for MSP430 (an ultra low power microcontroller designed by Texas Instruments Inc) devices. The final output of this project will be a complete standalone product.
1.2 Proposed Method
The proposed method was to implement the entire project in C# on the 3.5 .NET platform using the various options provided by the standard windows forms. We have also incorporated two other sets of code along with ours to increase the efficiency of our project.
1. Dock Manager
2. Syntax Text Highlighting
Both these sets of code were downloaded from the open source website “www.sourceforge.net “.
We have decided to name our IDE as “ENVIRON”.
1.3 Literature Survey
1.3.1 What is MSP430?
The MSP430 is a microcontroller family from Texas Instruments. Built around a 16-bit CPU, the MSP430 is designed for low cost, low power consumption embedded applications. The architecture is reminiscent of the DEC PDP-11. Unfortunately, the MSP430 lacks a very powerful feature of the PDP11, which was memory to memory indexing. This feature allowed interrupt routines to be written which used no registers, thus no stacking and unstacking required. The MSP430 is particularly well suited for wireless RF or battery powered applications.
The device comes in a variety of configurations featuring the usual peripherals: internal oscillator, timer including PWM, watchdog, USART, SPI, I2C, 10/12/14/16-bit ADCs, and brownout reset circuitry. Some less usual peripheral options include comparators (that can be used with the timers to do simple ADC), on-chip op-amps for signal conditioning, 12-bit DAC, LCD driver, hardware multiplier, and DMA for ADC results. Apart from some older EPROM (PMS430E3xx) and high volume mask ROM (MSP430Cxxx) versions, all of the devices are in-system programmable via JTAG or a built in bootstrap
References: Books [1] Jason Price and Mike Gunderloy, Mastering Visual C# .NET, Sybex Inc., 2001. [2] Jon Jagger and John Sharp, Microsoft Visual C# .NET Step By Step, Microsoft Press, 2003. Manuals [3] Texas Instruments Inc., MSP430x2xx Family User’s Guide, 2008 [4] Steve Underwood, MSPGCC :A port to the GNU tools to the Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontrollers, 2005 From the Internet