Kerry wrote in to let us know about his adventure in boot strap loading[BSL] his Launchpad to program his MSP430F5172 development board. Since he did not have a JTAG on hand and the MSP430F5172 does not support SBW programming**, he planned to use the Launchpad as a BSL.
Fortunately, most of the MSP430 devices can be programmed using the built-in BSL (Bootstrap Loader). And TI’s MSP430G2 Launchpad has a convenient utility which turns a Launchpad into a BSL programmer. More detailed information on the Launchpad BSL programming can be found here.
Since BSL is a feature that people often overlooked and instructions are pretty sketchy on the web, I thought I would give a little bit more detail on this using the MSP430F5172 development kit from SchmartBoard as an example.
43oh Member Spirilis recently created a development kit for the MSP430F5172 micro-controller based on the Launchpad form factor. You can buy his board @The 43oh Store for $20. His build thread is detailed in the 43oh Forum.
**Update 3/29/2013 – The MSP430F5172 does support SBW functionality according to the datasheet on pg-3. Thanks Robg.
Should be possible also to use the “new” ezfet-lite included in most recent MSP430 lauchpads? Feature expalined here: http://sysmagazine.com/posts/196924/ and here: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ-FET_lite
It would be awesome to be able to program MCUs using our lauchpads. This would make us able to minimize project size and cost.
Thanks in advance 🙂