MSP430 Programming

mspdebug and the eZ430f2013 under Mac OS X

There are various instructions floating around the Internet for getting mspdebug working on OS X with programming interfaces of various flavors. One which is documented, but for which the documentation is not scraped up in a single pile some place, is the eZ430f2013. It seems to differ somewhat from the rf2500 and other available adapters.

Configuring and compiling mspdebug 0.12 is rather straightforward. Make sure you follow the instructions and have libusb-legacy and libelf installed via MacPorts, then edit the Makefile to include -L/opt/local/lib/libusb-legacy in MACPORTS_LDFLAGS and edit the -lusb on the link line to read -lusb-legacy.

In order to use the eZ430f2012 with mspdebug, you will require an ACM adapter driver from TI.

Instructions on configuring the adapter can be found in this email, and they amount to the following:

1. Download the binary driver from this TI support page
2. Unzip the driver download and mount the included DMG. Copy the .kext from within the DMG to /System/Library/Extensions and run:

       sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/TIVCPSerial.kext
   

3. Edit /System/Library/Extensions/TIVCPSerial.kext/Contents/Info.plist to include the following XML stanza somewhere in the <key>IOKitPersonalities</key> section:

   <key>MSP-FET430UIF</key>
   <dict>
           <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
           <string>com.ti.driver.TIVCPSerial</string>
           <key>IOClass</key>
           <string>TIUMPSerial</string>
           <key>IOProviderClass</key>
           <string>IOUSBDevice</string>
           <key>IOTTYBaseName</key>
           <string>MSP-FET430UIF</string>
           <key>TIUMPChipset</key>
           <string>3410</string>
           <key>bcdDevice</key>
           <integer>257</integer>
           <key>idProduct</key>
           <integer>62512</integer>
           <key>idVendor</key>
           <integer>1105</integer>
   </dict>
   

4. At this point you may need to reboot. I did not.

After this, when inserting the eZ430f2013, you should find a device called /dev/tty.MSP-FET430UIFnnn, where the nnn is (unfortunately) assigned on each insertion. You can then use mspdebug with this device by invoking it as:

    mspdebug -d /dev/tty.MSP-FET430UIFnnn uif

mspgcc and Mac OS X

gcc 3.7.3 does not build without convincing on OS X (at least as of Snow Leopard), so mspgcc4 is your best bet for getting an environment going on OSX. The build scripts from the mspgcc4 sources work fine (as of October 2010) for building mspgcc4 on OS X.