We’ve seen a lot audio players around. Most of them plays .wav files pretty good. But every one has its own uniqueness like this one which is built around MSP430G2352 microcontroller. Sound quality is no surprise – somewhat good when playing at maximum rate 16kHz. But seems main focus were on creating FAT16 file system support on SD card.

In order to play your files you only need to copy files from PC (no long file name support). Program flow uses only 54 bytes of RAM memory.

This is a project for those who likes RGB-LEDs (Light emitting diodes) and TI’s launchpad – its also for those who hate messy wires!

This wireless RGB-LED controller makes use of launchpad’s capacitive touch library for MSP-430. The project board was built from a double sided PCB with female headers that pairs with the ones on the launchpad board – this makes it easy to connect the project to the controller board while maintaining the controller board re-usability. The bottom side of the board has four RGB-LEDs – one on each corner while the top side of board has three capacitive touch sensors – first is a triangular pad that sets which RGB-LED channel is selected, the other triangular pad resets the the LEDs to their default values. The third is a slider where you will slide your fingers to adjust the amount of red, green and blue – and theres more! they communicate wirelessly through a rf24L01 transceiver module. The rf24L01 modules takes the job of processing RF signals and communicates through the Shockburst protocol.

Since the RGB-LED’s brightness is controlled using pulse width modulation (PWM) the RGB-LEDs can easily be replaced with LED strips.

Jonathan attended FOSDEM 2012 event with his custom made name badge and shared some details of it. This is simple and straight forward design based on MSP430F5171 16-bit microcontroller that controls 5×8 LEDs where the name is scrolled.

LEDs are connected in rows and columns, so five and eight pins of MCU are occupied. No limiting resistors or any transistors are used as leds are driven dynamically. Badge is powered with 3V lithium coin cell. PCB is double side and home made. Jonathan used toner transfer method for this and results are great. 6 mil tracks look really great. After tryout he suggests to add more LEDs to get better resolution as 5×8 is pretty hard to read. Anyway this is great way to stand out in a crowd.

We all love games aren’t we? Sometimes simple games may be much catchier than heavy stuffed PC game. If you love building electronics toys this might be interesting. This is called MSP430 reaction game.

The idea of it is really simple. There are eight LEDs connected to MSP430G2231 using shift register. Microcontroller simply scrolls LEDs at selected speed and player has to stop light at specific LED. Build it and it may keep you busy for some time.

Normally when programing microcontrollers you have do install compiler tools locally on your PC. What if all this could be shifted online. All you would need to do open browser type in address and start writing code. Inventor Town has been doing this with MSP430 microcontrollers. This is cloud based MSP430 C compiler with simple IDE. All you need is to log-in with Google id.

They seem to support couple microcontrollers including MSP430x2231 and MSP430x2211. Also don’t expect too much from editor – it is very basic. Overall this is great idea especially if you are moving person and would like to have tools withing reach of your hand. Another benefit of using cloud based tools like this is that you don’t have to worry about software updates – all is done in one place without your intervention.