LaunchPad Hercules

The LaunchPad is a range of affordable baords from Texas Instruments. 

The latest release, the LaunchPad Hercules, is based on the TMS570LS0432 MCU or the RM42L432, designed for safety-critical applications.

There's a strong commitment to details:
  • the board has 4 protection rubbers beneath 
  • the USB cable is supplied
  • the rear silk screen displays the names of the pins
  • a printed quick introductory guide

The board has a built-in debugger and a 14-pin JTAG connector. 

Development

The IDE or integrated development environment is called CCS for Code Composer Studio. Installing CCS on Windows 8 can take a while. CCS is also available for Linux, but not for Mac OS X.

The board is not supported by Energia, the Processing-based Wiring-derived Arduino-like IDE, and thus not supported by embedXcode, as the later requires the former.

Texas Instruments supply a configurator, called HalCoGen, with RTOS extension. This configurator allows to select the interfaces planned for the project, and prepares all the files accordingly. Those files are imported and used by CCS later on.

I went through the basic blinky example in 3 hours and through the RTOS example proposed by Eric B. in 2 hours.

BoosterPacks

The Hercules LaunchPad features the extended 40-pin version for the BoosterPacks, the shields in LaunchPad speak. 

Some are built by Texas Instruments, and many others by external manufacturers. A comprehensive list is available here.


Right, the example with the Educational BoosterPack.
Surprisingly, 30 additional pins are provided while the BoosterPack specifications already define a 80-pin BoosterPack.

Pros

  • Very nice package, with USB cable
  • Compatibility with large offer of BoosterPack extension shields
  • Professional IDE from Texas Instruments
  • Introductory board to safety-critival applications and RTOS

Cons

  • This is clearly profesional material, both hardware and software, rather difficult to play with for hobbyists.
  • No Arduino-like Energia support, yet?

Wrap-Up

  • Profesional hardware and software
  • Suitable for hobbyists?

Links