MSP430FR5994 based wrist watch

Back up and running. ESD was the issue. It seems that the programmer suffered an ESD event when I was handling it. The watch itself it thankfully no worse for wear. That was annoying. Still I have things to improve on the ESD safety of my work area. Also, Digikey is awesome. They got me a board in just a few days over a holiday weekend. Just outstanding service. On to hacking at the firmware until the crumbled pieces of code vaguely resemble their intent.

So last night I was working on my watch. I had spent most of the day connecting pins on the external of the device to other pins to test for some sort of catastrophic failure. Then I tried to connect it to the MSP430FR5994 launchpad board to program it. It failed. I spent a while trying different combinations of computer restarts, different software and checking the wiring. I noticed whenever the watch was connected that it reset and stayed in a reset mode. This inferred two things. First, the reset pin on the watch is fully functioning. Second, the launchpad ezFET programmer was broken. Signs appear to be consistent with an ESD causing the reset pin to be shorted to ground. There are no other components between the ezFET IC and the watch IC besides a pull-up resistor. I then tried programming the target board on the Launchpad and nothing. I ordered a new one, but it will be about 2 weeks before it gets here. That gives me plenty of time to clean up my work area and get an actual ESD setup. 

Today, I finally started to do the write-up for a project I have been working on sporadically for a bit. It is a wrist watch based on the Texas Instruments Low-power microcontroller the MSP430FR5994. These things are pretty great. They have a ton of power in a little package. They also take less current than a single LED while running at full-tilt. 

I will continue adding things to this page, so subscribe or whatever. I mean the project is fully built, but I'm still working on the firmware.