Texas Instruments MSP430 Student Guide

MSP430ware (DriverLib)
DriverLib
The MSP430ware library used most often in this workshop will be the Driver Library – often called
DriverLib.
To quote the DriverLib documentation (we couldn’t have said this better ourselves):
The Texas Instruments® MSP430® Peripheral Driver Library is a set of drivers for accessing the peripherals found
on the MSP430 5xx/6xx family of microcontrollers. While they are not drivers in the pure operating system sense
(that is, they do not have a common interface and do not connect into a global device driver infrastructure), they do
provide a mechanism that makes it easy to use the device’s peripherals.
While we recommend that you read the entire “Introduction” in the DriverLib users guide (look in
the “doc” folder within the DriverLib folder), but this statement does a good job stating the intent of
the driver library.
In the following graphic, you can see that the Driver Library provides a convenient way to
program the MSP430 peripherals in an easy-to-read (hence easy-to-maintain).
In the previous chapter, we showed you the method of “Traditional C code with Header Files”. In
a few rare cases, you might still want to use the Header File symbols; in fact, DriverLib itself
utilizes some of these symbols, so they are both compatible with each other.
This said, the convenience of DriverLib’s API easily makes it the most desirable method of
programming MSP430 peripherals.
On a side note, you might remember a similar diagram (to that above) from the previous chapter.
One big difference is that diagram shows an additional, higher-level layer called Energia. Energia
(the Arduino port for TI microcontrollers) provides a convenient, portable means of programming
MSP430 peripherals – in fact, it’s even easier to use than DriverLib. Once again, you can even
mix the two programming paradigms. For some, this is a godsend, for others, it’s one abstraction
layer too much; therefore, most of the chapters in this workshop will focus on DriverLib. Please
check out the “Energia” chapter, though, if you’re interested in using the Arduino port for rapid
prototyping (or production coding).
3 - 4 MSP430 Workshop - Using GPIO with MSP430ware

Texas Instruments MSP430 Specifications

General

Brand	Texas Instruments
Model	MSP430
Category	Microcontrollers
Language	English