LaunchPad is here!
25 February, 2011
So, I’ve been busy with life these last weeks. But there are still interesting things going on at school — microcontrollers seem to be all the rage these days: we have 2 courses where we play with the critters.
Well, I now have my own (really cheap) board to play with: a Texas Instruments LaunchPad! I’m stepping through its temperature monitoring program as we speak 🙂
Fortunately, there are lots of tutorials on how to get started and if all goes well, we might have a small project to do with these dev kits. I leave you with some neat unpacking pics. I really wanted to capture my excitement (that wore off pretty quick) in getting my first hardware kit!
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~/proj 
Oh noes, another „launchpad” product (I almost thought you were talking about Apple’s launchpad)!
When you have the time and money, you could consider trying the not-that-cheap-but-more-fun Arduino board. That until you get to doing one yourself. All in all, they’re all worth their money, even just because you get to program on something else than a PC.
Hey,
Good luck with that. I am playing myself with a board. Python baby!
You know, after having had it for over a week, I’ve decided that I only care about it blinking its LEDs. Seriously, that is it.
The whole process of setting it up is infuriating: set up Windows, download the IDEs, get the examples, stept through the demo program, find out what all those nasty variables are…
I’ve gone back to playing with Scheme 🙂
I would recommend having a look at hack a day if you want to get some ideas. However, this doesn’t make it any easier to do hardware hacking. You might find some interesting tutorials, though.