[ The following note is important enough that I'm repeating it here, at the top, so you'll be sure to read it: ]
** DO NOT PING THE MSP430 APPS GUYS ABOUT THE JTAG DOCUMENT! ** It will be ready when it's ready. They _are_ working on it. It is _not_ ready for public consumption yet. If you bombard them with questions about when it's going to be ready, this will a) make them mad at you and b) make them mad at _me_. It will _not_ speed up its release. They know you want it, and are working to get it out as quickly as they're able (they do have other things to do, you know). Put another way: mashing the elevator button 10 times does _not_ make the elevator come any faster; but it might break the elevator button. [ And now, back to our regularly scheduled e-mail ] Hello all, As you all are no doubt aware, JTAG programming info for the MSP430 isn't publicly available. Info for the bootstrap loader is available, fortunately, and that's allowed the development of pyBSL; but for some designs, the bootstrap loader isn't the best way to go, and JTAG is often faster anyway. Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that a document describing the JTAG programming interface is now being prepared for public release. The bad news is that it's not ready yet, and I don't know when it will be ready, partially because I don't work for the MSP430 group. They'd planned to have it out at the end of January, but you know how that goes ... Fortunately for me, I happen to work for TI, and the MSP430 guys have very kindly sent me a preliminary copy of the document. Although it's a bit of a mess, I think it has what I need to write a JTAG programmer for Linux. I've started work on this already, and hope to have it somewhat working within a couple of weeks or so, depending on how much time I have. I've been given tacit permission to release this code before the JTAG docs are released, since the info is coming out anyway, so I'll release it to the project under GPL (provided you guys want it :) ). The version I'm writing is for the MSP-FETP430IF parallel-port adapter, which is what I have. If you have a different adapter, let me know so I can see about supporting it as well. A couple of notes: ** DO NOT PING THE MSP430 APPS GUYS ABOUT THE JTAG DOCUMENT! ** It will be ready when it's ready. They _are_ working on it. It is _not_ ready for public consumption yet. If you bombard them with questions about when it's going to be ready, this will a) make them mad at you and b) make them mad at _me_. It will _not_ speed up its release. They know you want it, and are working to get it out as quickly as they're able (they do have other things to do, you know). Put another way: mashing the elevator button 10 times does _not_ make the elevator come any faster; but it might break the elevator button. The other note is a bit about myself. As previously mentioned, I don't work for the MSP430 group - I work for Data Acquisition, which is part of what used to be Burr-Brown (we make precision ADCs, DACs, and other stuff like that). We're using the MSP430 on demo boards, and we like Linux, and we don't like the IAR stuff much; and since I write most of the firmware, you can well imagine that mspgcc is a godsend for me. (Last year I was actually contemplating undertaking the port myself!) Finally, I should note that I'm not doing this for work specifically - I'm doing the JTAG software on my own time; and this communication, although sent from my work address, is not official TI stuff, so don't sue us. :) cheers -- Michael Ashton Applications Engineer, Data Acquisition Products Texas Instruments Tucson <[email protected]> Office: +1 520 746 7257 Fax: +1 520 746 7220
