Graceful Configuration For MSP430

June 1, 2011

Texas Instrument's has added the Grace plug-in to Code Composer Studio to streamline peripheral configuration for their 16-bit MSP430 line.

William G. Wong

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Grace configuration GUI

Texas Instruments has delivered a plug-in for their Eclipse-based Code Composer Studio IDE that significantly simplifies the configuration of peripherals on their 16-bit MSP430 microcontroller. The new plug-in is called Grace.

Grace provides a GUI interface that highlights the peripherals for the selected target (Fig. 1). The abstraction level can be selected and includes Basic, Power User and Register views. It generates fully commented C code for all F2xx and G2xx microcontrollers.

Grace knows about peripheral dependencies. For example, a timer is usually used to provide the baud rate for a serial port. Tool tips provide additional information about the peripherals being configured.

Grace supports the range of MSP430 development tools. It can insert code directly into projects allowing changes to be easily incorporated. The C code is easier to debug than assembler while providing full functionality. Overall, Grace makes the job of peripheral configuration fast, efficient and error free.

Texas Instruments

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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