Karotte, from Carrot Industries, figured out a way to capture data from EnergyTrace capable Launchpads like the MSP430FR4133 kit, witout using Code Composer Studio.

The “official” way to make use of this feature is TI’s “Code Composer Studio” IDE. Since I don’t use CCS, installing CCS just for measuring current consumption seems a bit silly. Fortunately there’s a better way: TI provides an open-source library for communicating with some of their MSP430 programmers. As well as debugging control and programming the library also gives access to the EnergyTrace feature. So I wrote a small program based on an example that reads the EnergyTrace measurements.

Carrot Industry’s utility makes use of the MSP Debug Stack, which is the bridging element between PC software the MSP430. It handles tasks such as code download, stepping through code or break points. This data can then be fed to a visualization tool or plotting software like gnuplot.

You can join the discussion on 43oh, here.

EnergyTrace with MSP Debug Stack

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