Dave S

One of the things that makes MSP430™ microcontrollers (MCUs) great is the worldwide community and how much love they show for the platform with their designs, external forum and TI E2E™ community posts and conversations on social media. TI employees and the community have put together some interesting facts and firsts about the MSP430 MCU – our favorite top 14, in the spirit of the holiday, are listed below.

We’d love to hear about your #MSP430LOVE – share your first MSP430 MCU experiences on this post, on social or in the E2E forum.

1. The MSP430 MCU was created in Freising, Germany – a town north of Munich.
2. TI’s MSP430 FRAM MCU portfolio was introduced in 2010 and is now the largest in the industry.
3. CapTIvate™ touch technology provides the industry’s most noise immune touch sensing solution.
4. MSP430 Ultrasonic Sensing Subsystem provides the industry’s highest accuracy fully integrated flow measurement solution.
5. TI’s lowest-power MSP430 MCUs are so low power they can run off grapes.
6. MSP430 MCU was the first to introduce low-cost portable development system – a $20 USB stick debugger introduced in 2006.
7. The first LaunchPad development kit was designed with an MSP430 MCU and introduced in 2010.
8. MSP430 MCUs feature Energytrace™ technology allowing developers to quickly optimize the energy consumption of the MCU.
9. TI has shipped over 1 Million LaunchPad kits.
10. MSP430 MCUs were used to program the world’s smallest satellites with KickSat.
11. There are more than 525 different MSP430 microcontrollers on the market today; more than 3,200 if you include all package variants. Find the right one for your application here!
12. MSP430 MCUs are featured in almost 300 TI Reference Designs.
13. The world’s first wearable development kit, the eZ430-Chronos was introduced in 2009.
14. MSP430 MCUs have inspired 43Oh.com, a community of over 32,000 of “430” enthusiasts.