Electronic – TI Launchpad MSP430 on Serial in Linux

linuxmsp430serialuartusb

The MSP-EXP430G2 LaunchPad Experimenter Board User's Guide (Rev. C) in chapter 3.2 states:

The LaunchPad includes a pre-programmed MSP430G2553 device […]

Press button P1.3 to switch the application to a temperature
measurement mode. […]

The collected temperature data is
also communicated via back-channel UART through the USB emulation
circuitry back to the PC. The transmitted values […] can be displayed with any terminal application or
the Temperature Sensor GUI available on the MSP430 LaunchPad wiki page
http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/MSP430_LaunchPad_(MSP-EXP430G2).
The serial communication port on the PC must be configured with 2400
bps, one stop bit, and no flow control to display the values
correctly.

I've been trying to connect to the serial communication channel from linux using PuTTY (/dev/ttyACM0, 2400Bd, 8N1), but nothing happens.

Similar results with:

stty /dev/ttyACM0 2400
screen /dev/ttyACM0

I haven't seen the LaunchPad USB serial working yet, so I'm trying to figure out whether the problem is with my Linux install or with the LaunchPad.

How can I read the data from the LaunchPad demo in Linux?

EDIT1

I am on Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit

Linux 3.5.0-21-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 11 18:51:59 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


PACKAGE NAME      INSTALLED VERSION
binutils-msp430   2.22~msp20120406-2
gcc-msp430        4.6.3~mspgcc-20120406-3
gdb-msp430        7.2a~mspgcc-20111205-1ubuntu1
msp430-libc       20120224-1
msp430mcu         20120406-2
mspdebug          0.19-1
srecord
libsrecord-dev
libgmp-dev

Best Answer

This isn't too uncommon, especially if your system is a 64 bit system. Make sure you have these installed on your system:

  • binutils-msp430
  • gcc-msp430
  • gdb-msp430
  • msp430-libc
  • msp430mcu
  • mspdebug
  • srecord
  • libsrecord-dev
  • libgmp-dev

After connecting the launchpad, it may take a bit of time (~1min or less) for the system to pick it up. What happens if you have a terminal open that is just monitoring the port like cat /dev/ttyACM0, and you connect/disconnect the unit a few times?

Are you sure you have everything else installed properly? You may need a few extra things if your system is 64 bit, and the newer kernel versions >2.4 may have a bit of a problem with some programs, but nothing that isn't easily fixed. Assuming you use some Debian distro,

sudo apt-get install subversion gcc-4.4 texinfo patch libncurses5-dev zlibc zlib1g-dev libx11-dev libusb-dev libreadline6-dev

There is a How-to: Launchpad programming with Linux article that may help.

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