I’m releasing the PCB designs for the univ430 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license.

Why non-commercial? I used a freeware version of EAGLE to design the board, which comes with the condition that designs made with it are used in non-profit applications. Any moment now I will start using gEDA — I promise. When gEDA gets to the top of my project stack again, I will migrate!

You can download the tarball containing the PCB designs here.

univ430 adapter by Robert Spanton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

TI uses a 14 pin connector on basically all their demonstration boards. This has unused pins — and these immediately get sacrificed when designing real boards. The engineer may also attempt to arrange the connector so that plugging the lead in the wrong way around doesn’t do any fatal damage. This leads to different connectors pinouts being adopted by different engineers.

I got fed up of making adapters for basically every board that I came across. Keeping track of them once I’d made them was also an issue. I now have a component draw completely full of stripboard adapters. So I built a universal adapter, which I have named the “univ430″:

The 14 pin connector on the right-hand side is the connector that goes to the MSP430 programmer, and the connector on the left-hand side connects to the target board. The jumpers in the middle allow any useful signal on the 14 pin connector to be connected to any of the other connector’s 8 pins. The jumper that looks out of place at the top right of the board is for selecting whether the programmer should power the target board.

So now moving from programming/debugging one board to another is just a matter of moving some jumpers around on a board. The markings on the univ430 contain enough information for one to reconfigure the mapping given the target connector’s pinout. However, after doing this a few times and telling others how to do it with theirs, I found that this process could be a little tedious. So I wrote a utility that takes in a file containing the pinout of the target connector and outputs a diagram that looks like the one on the right.

You can grab the source from the git repository:

git clone git://gitorious.org/univ430-map/mainline.git univ430-map

Then build:

% cd univ430-map
% make

Have a look at the signals that you can put in your connector map by reading the MAP file.

% cat MAP
A:
 1) TCK
 2) TEST
 3) VCC
 4) GND

B:
 1) RST
 2) TDO/TDI
 3) TDI/VPP
 4) TMS

Create your connector map file. I now try to put these maps in with the source code of all the msp430 projects I’m involved with, in a file called “jtag-map”. Here’s the map for the Student Robotics motor controller:

vcc
tdo/tdi
tck
gnd

Getting the tool to generate the image is straight-forward:

./univ430-map -o map.png jtag-map

Your jumper layout will then be in map.png :-)

A Fedora RPM for this is coming soon, as is a connector for EZ430 programmers.