Date: 05/09/2011
Flashing costume
My two friends; Tom and Jason were having a double 21st costume party. I ordered a costume from a website but then for some reason went on and made a costume which included the MSP430.
As you can see above the costume consisted of a large box with three light up segments. The choice of "Tom" and "Jason" for two of the segments doesn't need to be explained. The love-heart I chose because I thought it would look well lit up and I had plans to source red LEDs to improve the effect. In retrospect simply putting "21" in the middle segment would have made more sense. I used LED arrays which I temporarily stole from torches to light each box. I wore the bought costume underneath the box which is also visible.
The electronics of the costume were housed in a lunch-box taped inside the box. The launchpad ran off 2 AA batteries, the LEDs ran off 4 AA batteries. The breadboard has a switch for LED power, a switch for launchpad power and a ULN2003A.
The costume took two evenings and an afternoon to complete. If I had longer I would have made the flashing sequence more elaborate and have added a button to invoke different modes/speeds and so on.
Date: 22/06/2011
Home-made seven segment display
I took seven rectangle LEDs from an old PCB I had lying around and made my own seven segment display to replace my broken one. I cut the LEDs into a piece of cardboard then soldered them up to some pin headers.
The program running on the MSP430 in the video below simply runs through the numbers 0-9 and repeats.
Date: 17/06/2011
Seven Segment display with Launchpad
I wanted to get the MSP430 controlling a seven segment display. I did but it turns out three of the segments were broken, not much fun.
Date: 15/06/2011
Stepper Motor with Launchpad
I have a basic program written to control the stepper motor with the MSP430. The motor turns 8.25 rotations clockwise and stops. I am using a Sparkfun power supply to power the MSP430 at 3.3V . The stepper motor is being run at 12V. A ULN2003A Darlington transistor array I bought on ebay handles the voltage step up between the microcontroller and motor.
Date: 08/06/2011
Stepper Motor
I salvaged this unipolar stepper motor from an old broken scanner. In the picture above I have a simple half rectifier circuit powering an LED from the stepper motor. I would be interested in hooking this up to the MSP430.
Date: 04/05/2011
LaunchPad
I bought a TI LaunchPad to experiment with a microcontroller. Originally I had my eyes on an Arduino but when I saw an Launchpad was selling for $4:30 I bought one without hesitation. The LaunchPad is the development platform for the MSP430 line of microcontrollers.
I haven't got around to anything more than running a few test programs yet. Below is a video of some code I found which plays Imperial March from Star wars. Link to code used here.
