Disadvantages of MSP430 relative to AVR and PIC?
in [Embedded]
|
Prev: 16C752 Problem
Next: MAX3421E to PIC18F4550
From: MC on 16 Dec 2008 19:04 At risk of starting a religious war... Why should I *not* prefer the MSP430 to the AVR and PIC? Tell me its weak points.
From: David Brown on 16 Dec 2008 20:29 MC wrote: > At risk of starting a religious war... > > Why should I *not* prefer the MSP430 to the AVR and PIC? > > Tell me its weak points. > > It's easier if you tell us what you need. Just to start the religious war rolling, if you want a gcc toolchain for the device you are best with the AVR (Atmel supports gcc directly, and the toolchain is regularly updated). The msp430 port is based on an old version of gcc - it works well enough, but has limited support for newer devices. The PIC requires fairly expensive commercial compilers for C support. I used to prefer the msp430 devices - they are cheap, low power, have plenty of pins, have a very nice cpu core, and some nice peripherals. But the AVRs are now cheaper and lower power (for many parts), the cpu is good (although it's 8-bit, it's as fast as the msp430 at the same clock), and the peripheral support is good.
From: Rich Webb on 16 Dec 2008 21:14 On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:04:17 -0500, "MC" <for.address.look(a)www.ai.uga.edu.slash.mc> wrote: >At risk of starting a religious war... > >Why should I *not* prefer the MSP430 to the AVR and PIC? > >Tell me its weak points. Many AVRs are available in DIP form factors. Handy for breadboard or stripboard layouts. AVRs (all?) support parallel programming in addition to in-system serial or fancier, later options. Nice to have if the fuse settings get totally borked and you want to recover the chip. However, it's probably good to have both families in your skill set, along with a 32-bit processor or two. -- Rich Webb Norfolk, VA
From: steve on 16 Dec 2008 22:42 On Dec 16, 4:04 pm, "MC" <for.address.l...(a)www.ai.uga.edu.slash.mc> wrote: > At risk of starting a religious war... > > Why should I *not* prefer the MSP430 to the AVR and PIC? > > Tell me its weak points. AVR and PIC have more active user forums (avrfreaks) No EEPROM MSP430 more expensive Can't program MSP430 FLASH down to 1.8Volts on some models the newer 5xx series fixes the last two problems
From: Grant Edwards on 16 Dec 2008 23:46
On 2008-12-17, MC <for.address.look(a)www.ai.uga.edu.slash.mc> wrote: > At risk of starting a religious war... > > Why should I *not* prefer the MSP430 to the AVR and PIC? TI's JTAG implimentation and support suck compared to AVR's. Dunno about PIC's. I took one look at the assembly code generated for a C function and ran the other way. -- |