http://hackaday.com/2010/06/22/ti-makes-a-big-bid-for-the-hobby-market/

This morning Texas Instruments unveiled Launchpad, a development platform for their low-cost MSP430 line of microcontrollers. We’ve seen these chips before, most notably in the ez430 Chronos sports watch. We see this as a bid for the hobby market currently enjoyed by Arduino, PIC, AVR, and others. TI’s biggest selling point is price, but we’re going to wait to share that with you. Join us after the break to see what the package offers, then decide if the price is right.

What is it?

We received a contact request on our tip line from a public relations firm on behalf of Texas Instruments. The video conference paired us with one of their engineers who took us through the details of the package, mentioning the low price tag every minute or so. Launchpad is a programming and development board for the TI MSP430. It has a machined DIP socket that can accept chips with up to 20 pins. All of these pins are broken out to the header ports on either side of the board, which resemble the Arduino layout to us. Good news, unlike the Arduino the header spacing falls into the 0.1″ divisions necessary to interface with common protoboard. TI is also looking for community involvement, pushing thier Lunchapad Wiki to help you get stated and asking that you add you knowledge as you find success with the 16-bit platform.

What’s inside?

Each Launchpad device comes with a whole lot of goodness. In addition to the board itself you get a 0.5 meter USB cable, two pin headers and two pin sockets for the pin breakout pads, two different MSP430 microprocessors (MSP430G2211 and MSP430G2231), and two free IDEs; Code Composer Studio 4 and IAR Embedded Workbench Kickstart (note that the latter has a 4K or 8K code limitation depending on the processor used).

Price

Hands down TI is trying to make price the biggest issue with this release. The presentation we were given included the price in large red numbers on seven of the thirteen slides. So here it is: Launchpad will set you back four dollars and thirty cents. And for now shipping is included.

Conclusion

It’s important to note that we haven’t had the board in hand yet. That being said, for $4.30 it’s worth the risk just to get the USB cable and a couple of processors. We’re amazed that they’ve beaten back the price to this point and delighted that you get the programmer and two microcontrollers, not to mention the other components. We like the fact that they didn’t develop an alternative language like Arduino did for the AVR controllers. This makes it easy to clear the hurdle of setting up a programmer, IDE and toolchain, and get right down to developing in C. After all, the chips are dirt cheap and quite powerful. You may remember 3000 of them from a project we saw over the weekend.

We’d imagine the initial demand will be quite high and hope they have the stock to keep up.
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

Nice Price to start with on the hardware, but its a pretty wimpy chip from what Ive read so far...

2K of flash code space vs 32k for the AVR/Arduino ?
Less ram, 1 timer, no hardware PWM

Also, the "free" development environment is limited to 8k code, OK, not a problem for *this* chip, but why bother learning something that is going to bite you for $450 for the "unlimited" version down the track when you want to move up to bigger projects ?

When will companies learn that offering "free now, $pay later" with buried hooks like that just isnt going to work when you are going up against an already established and thriving full-open-source free solution ?

Sure some suckers will go "wow, $4 !" and buy one, but its not going to make it past the "look at my micro controlled LED blinker" stage with gotcha's like that in it.


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Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/ The GCC toolchain for the Texas Instruments MSP430 MCUs perhaps?
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

Sure, there are alternative solutions that the open-source community has put together..

but the Gcc compiler by itself is a bit too techie for most hobbyists to get going with having to learn compiling, making, linking, etc.. If you want the hobbyist market, you need a "enter code here, push program button" environment..

I dont see why some chip companies feel the need to sting people who move on up to try to use their stuff in a more "serious" way.

I prefer that they make all the dev tools and environment open and free, and sell the chips at a more reasonably profitable price. Then *if* I incorporate their product into a product of mine, they get their piece according to how popular my product is. as it should be.

This way they're trying is a "here, have it cheap to play with, but if you start trying to get serious, we're going to slug you for big bucks *before* you get started" system..

what a dumb business model - Fail to TI (in my opinion) and I'll bet this chip dissapears into the same "tinkered with it and then ignored it" black hole that all their other attempts to move into the small microcontroller market have.
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Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

my understanding is that the TI MSP is all over the place in the volume product marketplace. Its really cheap basically.
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets