Hello everyone. This post is regarding an IDE called Energia, for msp430 launchpad. There are millions of arduino fans out there, who love the inbuilt libraries and functions for making projects easily. Hobbyists have the natural tendency to use arduino for their projects. This is justified by the large number of *shields that are available for arduino and the awesome arduino community. This is a good news for them as Energia enables coding msp430 microcontrollers using the arduino libraries and functions. In fact Energia has inbuilt example 'sketches' just like the arduino IDE which you can build and burn in the controller.
Yes the blink led sketch and all others, you can directly set the microcontroller you want to use and get the fun started. Energia is an open source project just like arduino. It was launched in 2012 i.e last year. There have been a few updated to improve the stability. The color of Energia is red (launchpad!!) unlike arduino which is blue. Now to talk about the code efficiency and the IDE stability. Since it uses another processors IDE libraries and functions and converts it into those which are compatible with our launchpad controllers, it is slower as compared to CSS,IAR and other development environments. It may seem to test your patience, but then you are getting best of both worlds right? So one shouldn't complain about it. So now you have various methods to reduce your coding time. If you want to interface an 16x2LCD just import the lcd library and use the inbuilt functions to perform the tasks that you require. So if a LCD is like ABCD.. type basic thing in your project you can avoid initializing those peripherals manually via control signals and command words. Makes our life easy, isn't it?
This is the link to the Energia website if you are interested.
Here you can download the latest Energia version. There is help page as most sites have. The most important advantage of Energia is that you'll open up the gate to a humongous community i.e arduino community.
Hope this post was informative. Thank you for reading this.
* Shield refers to a hardware that performs a specific set of tasks and can be mounted onto the arduino board. On that note I'll like to introduce the booster packs of launchpad. Booster pack is the launchpad version of the name shield.
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