Hypomnemata

TI recently announced a new entry in the hobbyist microcontroller space, the TI LaunchPad, which is targeted at the Arduino market.  I don’t believe it’s going to make much of a dent, though.  I spent a while looking at the LaunchPad. I like the idea of it, and I love that TI is doing something to make devices cheaper and therefore more accessible (which is why I built the Breaduino and Volksduino kits, low-cost, accessible Arduino clones). After my initial excitement, though, I’m feeling pretty negative about the device’s future.

(Shameless plug: order the Volksduino kit for $20!)

The kit is a $4.30 purchase, which sounds great, until you find out what’s in it: everything.  Not great, but incredible!  It’s got a USB programmer, a couple of MSP430 Value Line microcontrollers, the development environments.  It even includes the USB cable, and comes in a nice box.  The website has an unboxing video, which is … odd, for a uC dev kit.  Overall, this is a fantastic value, and a wonderful development kit.  If the IDEs are remotely friendly, it makes a compelling first device.

First off, they must be taking a loss on every one of these. I priced out building a knock-off of just the carrier board (without all the control electronics, though with a regulator). I can’t do a kit for less than $4.50*, not including the actual MSP430 chips.  True, they’re using all their own parts, so it’s probably not more than $6 a board, but, still, it’s impossible for anyone but TI to make the main board with their pricing.  This locks up the core of the ecosystem, but might be okay: people can make stations (what I’m calling “shields” for this board).

Judging from the photos, the footprint is 2″x2″, with the header rows at 1.8″ apart. This is just a tad larger than the little Radio Shack protoboards, but not small enough to make the larger protoboards look “at home” docked to the top of it. Their pin layout is suitable for doing stations, but it’s teensy. The Arduino shield footprint is annoyingly small, and this thing is smaller still. And, of course, these microcontrollers have a lot fewer GPIO and analog inputs  than the Atmegas, so you can’t do a useful station-shield adapter board. Beyond that, it looks to be 3.3V only; ask Sparkfun how popular 3.3V Arduinos are vs their 5V siblings.  Overall, I don’t find it terribly friendly to kit work.

TI is going to move a ton of these devkits, but I don’t see it developing into an ecosystem like the Arduino’s. Kitmakers are going to feel the “cheap cheap cheap!” pressure, and it’s going to be really hard to escape that.

(That said, I have a design for the “ProtoStation” already done. I just need to get my mitts on a copy of the board to double-check my schematic before I send it off to the board house. Hopefully people are willing to spend another $3~10 on their new ultra-cheap toys.)

* NB: TI hasn’t published application notes for that uC, nor a reference schematic in the datasheet, so my design estimate is ballpark, within a quarter or so.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2010 at 13:12 UTC and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.