TI Tech Day unveils the MAVRK prototyping system
I was lucky enough to go to the Texas Instruments tech day here in San Jose last week. It was fantastic and I encourage all engineers to attend this an other conferences like our famous ESC conference now rebranded DESIGN West, if only because EDN’s own Margery Conner will be running her hardware design conference for LEDs as part of the show.
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TI’s tech days were run like a mini show and conference. They had a bunch of booths where TI departments and third-party vendors could show off their wares.
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You also get a free lunch. These seats were all filled at noon. Not only that, at the lunch TI VP of analog marketing Steve Parks announced that TI would not just cover half the parking fee, they would pay for it all. Here at the lunch I got to meet TI’s world-wide technical training manager Paul Nossaman. It was great to see that TI believes so strongly in training, since I go back to the National Semiconductor Analog Seminar with Bob Pease. Bob would have loved the way TI promotes training.
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Here is one of the show booth demos put on by my pal John Goldie, of the interface group. It is a 10Gbps retimer setup running through 10 meters of cable and 30 inches of FR4. They have an eye diagram that shows how good the transmission works. There were dozens of other demos at the booths.
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Here is TI program and marketing manager Carol Primdahl showing off the new MAVRK prototyping system. MAVRK stands for “modular and versatile reference kit“. This is a really big deal, a standard motherboard that carries a MSP430 micro plug in card with a bunch of sockets to plug in modules, along with the demo software to make it all work, see below. This is a scoop for EDN since TI has not gone completely public about this as they ramp up production. Look for their announcement soon though. They do have a MAVRK forum up an running. This is another great reason to go to the TI Tech Day, you will get advance notice of parts, programs and projects.
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Here was my favorite demo, it used two MAVRK systems, one on the robot and one to control the robot.
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Here is the MAVRK system that controls the robot. You can see the joystick plugged into the motherboard at the upper left.
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The applications you can prototype with MAVRK are unlimited. Here the TI team has done a highly accurate scale. The great thing about MAVRK is that its not just hardware help, they are supplying software as well.
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There were only a handful of people at the MAVRK demo, engineers must not yet realize how cool this thing is. They gave out a $199 starter kit to a lucky raffle winner. Here is Michael Primeau holding his new toy. You folks really have to start going to the TI tech day. Free lunch, free parking, free demo system. Best of all, you get a card where you can buy any TI demo kit or tool for 10 bucks as long as the list price is under $500. For tools over $500, they will give you half price.
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The MAVRK has a RF area where you can plug in Bluetooth or other RF modules.
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Here is a MAVRK set up as an electrocardiogram machine.
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The MAVRK system has a place for you to prototype your power system, including battery systems. You aren’t stuck with TI modules, you are welcome to design your own and third-party vendors and even competitors are sure to start supporting the MAVRK platform. I will give one caution learned by a pal whose company went bankrupt. TI means well and really want you to succeed, but don’t think that having reference code for different modules will mean the software is all done. You can’t have a product with all global variables and stitched-together reference code. You need to start with the TI code and spend a lot of time with it to make it a product where all the parts work together. My pal had a boss who heard “reference code” and he thought that meant they could have a product with no software effort. There is no way TI can provide you the custom code needed for your product, that is your responsibility. Make sure that your boss understands that the MAVRK and all the vendor’s kits will give you a start, but it does not mean you won’t need people and time to actually make a working product design, both in hardware and especially in software.
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The MAVRK prototyping system was just two of the dozens of TI Tech Day seminars. Here is my amplifier buddy Hooman Hashemi giving a talk to a well-attended session on high-speed amplifier design. I also went to session on motor control and the Android operating system. Hardware, software, and systems, you can get it all, be sure to sign up if they swing anywhere near your town.
Finally, if I can rotate the video I took at the MAVRK demo in my Sony Vegas 9, I will end with a video of Carol running the MAVRK robot. Sometimes it breaks the comment section so here is hoping. Otherwise, here is a link to the YouTube.
here is the embed
Mike C commented:
Paul is correct, the full CCS tool is locked to the MAVRK platform, which allows any new MAVRK user to access the full capabilities of the MSP430 processor without any additional costs of a C compiler. It is also correct that the Full version of CCS is not free, its cost is $445.00. We are also aware there are a large number of existing customers that use the IAR EW430 tools, so we support these with our code as well. There is a free GNU tool, mspgcc, which is supported on sourceforge that has had a major makeover in the past year. The MAVRK goal is to be open source on our software (BSD) as well as our hardware. We made the decision to utilize CCS and IAR in our development of our software simply because we know the developers and can keep ahead of any changes in the tools as they are updated. We certainly would support any efforts in converting the existing code to GCC. It should be noted that the MSP4305438A is one processor module and that the MAVRK team has plans to eventually support all of Texas Instruments’ processors on the MAVRK platform. Like our hardware, our code is modular, which we believe will enable any user to quickly switch out the processor using the same code APIs. Linux drivers will certainly be different than embedded code, but we are working on ways to make that transition as seamless as possible to the end users.
Jimelectr commented:
@LostInSpace - I don't remember Xilinx having anything to do with programmable analog, but I've seen that programmable analog stuff come and go. People just don't get that analog does not equal digital! The value and performance of analog parts is intimately tied to the IC process, so if you go for the least common denominator and choose the popular digital process node to keep costs down, the performance is crap compared to discrete op amps, filters, converters, etc. Programmable analog just doesn't make economic sense. I wish I had a tenth of the money that's been spent on it!
LostInSpace commented:
Paul - OK say that TI will give us a copy of CCS that is locked to the board. To make a product with my own board/chip I have to buy CCS @ $800. Why would I do this if I can get a processor with GNU or $100 tool chains? In my mind this is why Microchip is here today - they saw that the tool chain needed to be very low cost - they quickly dumped their charging for the assembler to giving it away and now they have a billion $$$ of other peoples sales. This is why so many cool ideas die. Remember that really cool Xilinx programmable analog chip a few years back - they sold the compiler for like 2 Grand and what penetration do they have today - 0%! Because no one ever even played with that thing. That's how sales start in this business. Engineers play with it first then take it to work and design products with it, but if the going in price is too much then they won't ever get to the play with it stage. Naturally TI is welcome to do whatever they want to in the market, this is just my perspective (I don't want TI mad at me... ha, ha, ha - I like their OPAMPs)
Paul Rako commented:
Yeah, I remember them saying the IAR tool was big bucks 1 or 2 grand, but the code composer stuff is free, they lock it to the board, and then allow you to use on the target. I will let a TI person explain better, but you will be able to have a development system to use, for free. Maybe the stuff on the wiki is old, remember this is an EDN scoop, so some of the web info has not caught up to the real deal TI is giving you.
LostInSpace commented:
As I read the TI Wiki page on this product it says about the software compilers needed to drive it: "Please note that you can't use the free version of IAR (which is limited to 8K of code) or the free version of CCS (which won't work with the MSP430)."
So you have to pay big bucks to program the thing - that makes it a non starter in a universe of past and present non starters.... We've seen this before, Microchip has a Billion dollars of PIC business that should have belonged to Motorola simply because Microchip figured out that the tools need to be free. TI hasn't figured this out yet.
