Embedded Webblog

Laying claim to the world’s smallest low-power wireless development kit, Texas Instruments, recently introduced a new tool for designing embedded systems that combines MSP430 microcontrollers with wireless communications. Packaged in a USB stick form factor, the Z430-RF2500 development tool includes two RF-enabled microcontroller target boards and a PC-based debugging interface. The USB development interface plugs into a PC port and connects directly to the MCU-RF target board, providing the developer with the essential elements of a wireless network.

The eZ430-RF2500T target board includes a MSP430F2274 microcontroller and a CC2500 RF transceiver. The microcontroller is based on 16-bit RISC architecture and includes 32 Kbytes of flash memory and 1 Kbyte of RAM.  The MSP430F2274 also features a 12-channel, 10-bit analog-to-digital converter that samples at up to 200 kilosamples per second.  Other on-chip peripherals include two operational amplifiers and support for several serial communications protocols. The CC2500 is a multichannel RF transceiver designed for low-power wireless applications in the 2.4 GHz Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band.  The transceiver has an automated packet engine and supports data rates from 1.2 to 500 kbps. A battery pack is also included in the kit to allow the target board to operate as a stand-alone system.

The eZ430-RF2500 kit comes with all the software needed to program wireless MSP430 applications. The user can choose either the IAR Embedded Workbench or TI’s Code Composer Studio Essentials development environments to write and download code, then debug the application at full speed using hardware breakpoints and single stepping. The kit’s software includes a protocol stack for low-power RF networks and hardware abstraction layers to simplify the design and prototyping of wireless systems. The kit also includes a complete sample project, measuring temperature and voltage through a wireless sensor network. The development tool and target boards will be available in October at the TI online store. Pricing is $49 per unit for the eZ430-RF2500 tool and $20 for additional eZ430-RF2500T target boards.