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.