CircuitCo sponsored a couple of members of the 43oh Forum the Educational BoosterPack. One of them, Rei Vilo put together a full review of the BoosterPack on his blog. He explores the LCD, LED and accelerometer parts of the BoosterPack with detailed pictures. The BoosterPack comes with no out-of-the-box software. Rei Vilo is developing his own here.
I did purchase one of these after taking a TI demo class online. It turned out way more expensive than advertized, and the lack of sample code means it’s still brand new in a bag, two months later
not happy.
OTOH, the capacitive booster shield came with a pre-programmed MCU, and lots of data available on the web. I sort of had expected that level of quality with this one, and missed. I will be following the links here, see if I can get to use this finally
I visited Rei Vilo’s site, and was surprised that he saw the lack of code as a feature, not a bug. Of course he is entitled to his opinion, though for us noobs the steep learning curve he wishes we were to enjoy is way too much, IMHO.
The potential for this shield to be used in schools, etc., is killed dead if it requires extreme savvy. I am sure those able will push the limits – it would be nice there were a simple recipe to follow (and then adapt, modify) for the rest of us.
I personally prefer not to use Energia – wish a library that I could use with GCC will eventually emerge
Thank you for your comment. In my review, I had mixed feelings about the lack of software. Feature or bug?
As a feature, students have to read, understand and implement specification sheets, under the guidance of their profesor
As a bug, the ” No software provided ” gets the hobbyists lost and is clearly stated under the CONS list.
I’ve developed and released a library for Energia. Feel free to adapt it to another IDE. Energia provides a hardware abstraction layer to make the MSP430 easier to use.
As a matter of fact, Energia uses the GCC version 4.6.3 tool-chain. On a Mac, just have a look inside at /Applications/Energia.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/msp430/bin/msp430-gcc
Enjoy!