Texas Instruments "Launch Pad" uC Dev Kit!

[Mark_Hardware]

Ordered mine. I noticed the e-store changed from TIe-store to either "Arrow" or "Mouser". Arrow was down, so I ordered from Mouser. It's backordered, so I'll get it when they do. But, it's bought and paid for, anyway.

[x88x]

Ok, so I finally got around to ordering mine. They have around 7 different distributers carrying it now, but since they're all backordered, I went ahead and ordered mine directly from TI. Now, annoying thing here, TI requires that you put in a company. ..and the page errors out if you put in "n/a"... -_^ ...did it never occur to the site designers that hobbyists might want to buy stuff from them? I went with the slight derivation of "na" instead, and it was fine with that, it's just annoying that they require that I put in anything.

[BuzzKillington]

What can you do with 2k? What kinda projects would this be be good for? I'm not saying "oh geez, what good is 2k" I'm saying, "I don't know anything about these things and wanna try it out and need to know what it would be good for." lol

[x88x]

Well, what I have in mind is to use it to time the capacitor charging circuit and discharge sequence for the coilgun I'm working on. Even if I end up having to use 2 it'll still be cheaper than using an AVR (not much, granted, but still ).

[Oneslowz28]

You can blink some LEDS with 2k of flash, COntrol RGB LEDs, maybe do some simple servo control. I too have a few of these on the way.

[crenn]

The limiting factor in my opinion is the 100 bytes of RAM thant he flash, a good program will take less than 2kB of flash depending on how it's designed.

EDIT: And the scale of the program

[Oneslowz28]

There were some questions in the open source community that were brought up over and over again about the LaunchPad so I sent a few of them to TI and just posted the reply on my site.

http://themakersworkbench.com/?q=node/394

[x88x]

Great to hear about the future uC line expansion! Especially if they maintain the same prices. What they mention about the unversality of the board is one thing I really like about it as well. A lot of Arduinos/clones/compatible, like they said, solder the chip on the board, so you have to have additional equipment to roll a production chip. This, it looks like you just pop the chip out, and stick it in your final circuit.

[chaksq]

This seems like an awesome deal, especially for someone only mildly interested in this sort of thing like myself. I've always been like, well those look cool and maybe I could use them for some automization/motorization projects but just never could justify buying one personally. At $4.30 that's an acceptible risk to me to try the hobby and not feel shortchanged if I decide it isn't for me.

[x88x]

Anyone have theirs yet? I thought they were supposed to be in stock by now, but I haven't gotten mine or heard from them (I bought it straight from TI), and according to their online check, they have to record of an order with my account. ..I'm gonna contact them today to see what's going on, but I was wondering if anyone else had gotten theirs to see if maybe they're just still out of stock.