Now it is just a concept what occupied my head for the last few days.
I'm a friend of TI's Launchpads. Specially the MSP-G430 ones. I used this MCU and Launchpad for prototyping several my previous finished and unfinished project.
One thing is itching for a while. The launchpad uses it's own Booster packs, what is not compatible with the most commonly used Arduino shields.
So, what if I can overcome this incompatibility. What if I design something what is able to fit between this two worlds?
Lets make this happen!
The first one I want to achieve is the following:
A board sit on the top of the G430 launchpad and able to accommodate the classic Arduino Uno R3 compatible shields.
- Collect a few Arduino shields for testing and to make the pinout as compatible as possible (I've Pololu Zumo robot, Seeedstudio Starter shield, Freescale sensor shield, an Ethernet and a MP3 shield already on hand)
- Design a power supply what is flexible enough to handle the 3.3V and the 5V requirements. I think about the following:
Power sources:
1. Launchpad's 3.3V (3.6V ?)
2. USB connector on the booster pack
3. External power connector on the booster pack (let say 3V-15V ?)
Automatic switching between the sources
- Handle the level shifting requirements between the 3.3V and the 5V (also on I2C and maybe on analog side)
- Handle the pin shortage - The MSP430G2553, what I intend to use only has 16 usable data pins. It looks like this will not be enough for some of the Arduino shields. I want to use some I2C or SPI based bus extender to handle this.