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Launchpad Boards and BoosterPacks
Launchpad boards are affordable MSP430 evaluation kits. For just few dollars, you can have your own
Launchpad boards. They are so cheap that an average school-going student can afford one with
his/her own pocket money. However, this cheapness doesn’t compromise quality nor performance.
They are more-or-less alike Arduino boards in terms of board size and on-board resources except they
don’t share same pin naming conventions and board layouts. Well that’s not a big issue. However, it
would have been better if the Launchpads shared Arduino-like form factor. This would have enabled
using Arduino shields with Launchpads. TI has, however, its own brand of shields called BoosterPacks
and they seem to like promoting their own idea, owing to which there’s still no official TI Launchpad
that share exactly Arduino form-factor/shape. It is a very aggressive marketing boldness. Shown below
is the BOOSTXL-EDUMKII BoosterPack. It is just like Arduino Esplora with lots of on-board sensors and
devices except for the MCU. It is good for game development and sensor applications. There are other
useful BoosterPacks dedicated for capacitive touch, displays and so on.
Launchpad boards are not the only development boards offered by TI. There are many other dev
boards too. Shown below is the TI MSP-EXP430F5438 Bluetooth platform development board.
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