Energia and MSP430G2553

Recently I had a little bit more deep experience with Energia and the MSP430G2553.
Here some notes about this experience.



I did two projects so far using Energia and I have to say that a) I was able to do them really fast (well, the first one with a big start with the help of Roberto) and b) they are working surprisingly good.
For fast prototyping I would say that the MSP430 plus Energia is a good platform.
What is not good ?

Well,  is really missing a decent debugger.
I had some strange problems, like for example a restarting code without any clue about "why", or strange behavior events using the I2C on a MSP430G2452 (I solved that using the MSP430G2553).
Very very hard to figure it out these problems without any debug tool.

But also to test the logic of a sketch even a basic debugger would be a great thing.
The second big Cons of Energia is the needed memory.

It is mandatory to use chipset with at least 16K for very simple projects.
The second one I'm working on (I'll publish a separate article on that) already is over 12K and is far to be completed.
I'm sure I'll reach a point where I'll have to migrate on a bigger board, like the F2259.

Update - December 2018

Well, quite a while I didn't work on Energia.
To complete a project (UV Timer) I had to go back to Energia.
Of course everything changed, including my computer since last time I did used Energia.
So I did installed the IDE (latest version) un my Ubuntu machine, re-figured out all the settings and retrieve the needed libraries, finally able to recompile the code and ... nothing.
The code is compiled, loaded in the MSP430 and nothing is working.

Firing up my old laptop that still has a very ancient version of Energia did the trick, i.e. I was able to compile the SAME code compiled on my Ubuntu machine and successfully load it on the board.
Still something fishy but there are differences due to the new circuit for the project, so I was expecting some problems.
Anyway, the fact that using a recent version of Linux and the latest Energia IDE is not producing a working code is quite annoying.
To solve this kind of problem I need to invest A LOT of time researching and asking around and doing tests.
As I wrote in the article Technology changes this kind of unreliability is at least irritating and can easily bring to abandon a platform.
I'm already tempted to trash away the MSP430 and just use a normal Arduino to handle the project.