LaunchPad Platform
The LaunchPad is a development platform from Texas Instruments for different MCUs, 16-bit MSP430 and 32-bit ARM-based.
All the boards feature a programmer-debugger and include a USB cable. They are aggressively priced and offer an unparalleled value. The shields are called BoosterPacks and come with 20-pin or 40-pin connectors. They offer an extended range of displays, sensors and communication radios, including sub-1GHz, ZigBee, Bluetooth and WiFi. In the list below, references in bold are recommended and references in italic are deprecated. Energia, the fork of the Arduino IDE and SDK for the LaunchPad boards, is no longer maintained. The last release 1.8.10E23 was published in December 2019. The official tools from Texas Instruments are Code Composer Studio, based on Eclipse with an online variant, and the SimpleLink SDK for the ARM Cortex-M MCUs. |
16-bit LaunchPads |
32-bit LaunchPadsOther LaunchPads |
LaunchPads for IoT |
LaunchPad SensorTag KitsReference |
Pins Maps
I've designed a pins map for the LaunchPads and BoosterPacks, with standardised colours for the Energia implementation of the I²C, SPI and UART ports and digital and analog GPIO pins.
Find the list of the LaunchPads and BoosterPacks Pins Maps. The Inter-Boards Pins Compatibility Table includes all the LaunchPads and BoosterPacks to check compatibilities. |
Development Tools
The official IDE is Code Composer Studio, maintained by Texas Instruments and based on Eclipse. It is available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Most of the LaunchPads are supported by Energia, a fork of the Arduino IDE based on the Wiring framework and available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Based on the Energia framework, embedXcode is a template for Xcode on Mac OS X and Visual Micro a plug-in for Visual Studio on Windows. |