My 15 Minutes of Fame?

My tinkering was featured on Four-Three-oh!

I’ve been playing with the MSP430 Launchpad recently, trying to teach myself how to use microcontrollers.  The Launchpad is great!  USB flash programmer, emulation, demo platform, and a break-out board all in one.  They even supply two (slightly different) MSP430 DIPs.  All that for US$4.30 (if you can wait; demand is high).

I wanted to connect the LaunchPad to a breadboard to use a few more LEDs than those on the board.  I started out just using jumpers, but then my OCD kicked in…  I made the prototype connector board in the photo above out of some perfboard and male headers (i put female headers on the LaunchPad).  It transfers all 20 pins from the breakout board to the breadboard (even though I only have 14-pin MSP430s).  Lots neater than separate jumpers, and it connects the boards physically pretty well, so I don’t have to worry about knocking a connection loose.

Then my OCD kicked in again…  Why not do a printed circuit board?  So I set to learning Eagle CAD.  Eagle is pretty good, but the initial learning curve is fairly steep.  Luckily, there are several good tutorials on the internet. 

The resulting design is pictured above.  I’ll write more (and post Eagle files) when I get the boards (near the end of the month).

Thanks again to Four-Three-oh!