Energia for MSP430 Launchpad Rocks!

I just got the Energia IDE running under 64bit Ubuntu 12.10. Specifically Linux Mint 14. I have to say, Energia totally rocks. From the website at energia.nu "Energia is a rapid electronics prototyping platform for the Texas Instruments msp430 LaunchPad. Energia is based on Wiring and Arduino and uses the Processing IDE".

In short, if you're used to working with the Arduino, you'll feel right at home with Energia. It's an IDE, framework and compiler (plus examples) for the MSP430 Launchpad. What I love about it is that it looks just like the Arduino IDE. You edit your code and compile right there within Energia... just like you do with the Arduino...with an IDE that is a dead ringer visually for the Arduino IDE.

What's cool about Energia also is that if you want to dispel with the framework and do everything in gcc (so you're still able to use the IDE and it's functionality, but technically you enter the wild wild west and you're doing everything in gcc-msp430 - giving you more control), you can do that too. I found a post on the www.43oh.com site showing how to do that here.

When you first got your Arduino, what was the very first application you compiled and ran on it? Yup, the 'Hello World' for microcontrollers - Blink. Energia has the Blink example too. The difference between the code? Essentially a different LED designator! On a $4.30 USD device!

I'm going to be blogging a whole lot more about the MSP430 Launchpad and Energia. If you can't tell, I'm really excited about it. TI is being very aggressive with the pricing on the MSP430 Launchpad and is aiming straight at the hobbyist market with it.

Until I get some posts up, here's the details:
Energia can be found here.
The Github repo for Energia is here.
Texas Instrument's Launchpad site is here.
The best community I've found for the Launchpad is here.
On Freenode IRC, #43oh and #energia are full of very helpful people. A special props nod to Rickta59 for his help on the Energia install.

I'm typing up my notes now on the install of Energia. There are precompiled binaries for 32bit systems here, however the 64bit Linux side is a manual compile.

dmesg junk with the EW7811-UN WiFi adapter

I posted awhile back on my Google+ account about my issues with the Edimax EW7811-UN WiFi adapter that worked great with the RasPi, but got no love under Ubuntu. It's an awesome little device...when it works...and it's so tiny! Anyway, a cool cat named Cian McGovern has a great write-up (don't forget to go to the Comment he mentions in the post) at http://www.cianmcgovern.com/getting-the-edimax-ew-7811un-working-on-linux/

One other issue - by default the Realtek driver has power saving turned on. What you get is a whole buncha crap like this in dmesg:

[ 1139.170000] rtl8192c_dm_RF_Saving(): RF_Normal
[ 1139.170000] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2
[ 1139.850000] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save.. 
[ 1139.850000] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
[ 1141.170000] rtl8192c_dm_RF_Saving(): RF_Save
[ 1145.170000] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...
I noticed the same junk spilling into dmesg on my Raspberry Pi, and I saw a lot of messages doing a Google search with people wanting to get rid of all this debug(?) stuff. I believe there's flags when you compile the driver to shut it off at that level, but even easier is to:

1. Create a file called 8192cu.conf in /etc/modprobe.d
2. In that file put "options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0" (without the quotes)
3. Easiest thing to do after you've created the file is to restart your box.

The above is love from http://linux-sunxi.org/Wifi, and whomever wrote that is now my new best friend for the day - to bad there's only 3 more hours in this day. :-)

First dip into the Linux SDR pool...

Having just got my new Linux box setup (primary home and work computers being Wintel 7, but I'm doing my best with this work computer to do everything in Linux starting by installing Linux Mint), I'm working on getting an SDR setup done. So far it looks like GQRX by OZ9AEC is a good app to investigate, knowing that SDR# runs under Mono and that'd be to easy. GQRX-SDR looks like it does just enough to get my feet wet, while also letting me investigate how Linux SDR works.

So first thing is to install QT, and in this case I'm opting for QT 4.7. QT5.0 is out, but I'm not wanting to go bleeding edge just yet. :-)

I downloaded the source and started to go through the official compile instructions on the official site, and right away got weird errors trying to do the make. The "configure" went fine, but there actually was no make file created. Ok, time for Plan B...which is to just do apt-get a few times.

I wholeheartedly recommend the wikihow.com tutorial here. The install went flawless.

Next step: Get GQRX-SDR installed.