This is possibly the most informative post I’ve found on the mspgcc-users mailing list so far. It’s possibly amazing. I should be able to use either the UIF or EZ430 tool that TI sell.

What I’d like to use is the MSP430-JTAG-TINY USB JTAG adapter from Olimex. Olimex claim that it “works with free GCC C compiler and Insight MSP430 toolchain and debugger “, however, I am yet to discover to what degree this actually “works”. I’ve emailed Olimex to get some more info about using the MSP430-JTAG-TINY with msp430-gdb under Linux.

A quick price comparison: the Olimex tool is £35, whilst the TI UIF is £50 (assuming I can get the TI one for the USD price).

MSP430-JTAG-TINY

After more mspgcc-users archive poking, I found a couple of people who were talking about using this Olimex tool. However, they were using it under windows. It would seem that to get it to work in windows, one grabs the DLLs that Olimex give you, and one replaces the original TI DLLs with them. Olimex provide these DLLs in a zip file downloadable from their site.

This thread is interesting, for two reasons. Firstly, it contains a comment about the slowness of parallel port interfaces, from Steve Underwood:

People complain its not that fast, but they always have. You’ll find IAR and the other tool chains exchange data more slowly in recent versions. There seems to have been some changes to the TI code which slow it down. I guess its doing more checking somewhere. I keep meaning to investigate the cause, but never seem to get around to it. Its not something mspgcc specific, though. I find your speed ratio a little extreme. I’ve never had any version exchange as fast as 30 packets/second, and I don’t get anything as slow as one per second now. There has definitely been a slowdown, though. The USB tools are much faster, but that probably
doesn’t help you.

The second interesting thing in this thread is that someone, Grant Edwards, asks about which USB devices work under Linux. Steve Underwood actually replies. He states that if the USB device behaves in the same way as the TI tools, then it should work with no problems. He then goes on to say that he’s happy to build a compatability chart into the mspgcc website if people provide information. This doesn’t appear to have happened yet.

I think I’m going to buy the Olimex adapter… Unless I can find the TI one amazingly cheap somewhere.

Update: Farnell sell the TI tools: 1172234 and 1172235.

Tags: development, electronics, linux

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