Since I have a few days off (and highly reduced intake) - Iīve finally dared to throw myself into the ARMS of the Stellaris Launchpad a few of you and I ordered from TI.

Why? Itīs a darn cheap and easy way to get into USB + microcontroller coding straight away, everything set up, neat and easy. Iīm going to share some of my first step experiences here with you just in case you havenīt passed the "unboxing, plugging it in...wow...fancy colors" phase yet.

First of you need to download the software that is only available from the TI site, Itīs the Code Composer studio V5.2, and itīs friggin HUUUUUGE. You better have a fast computer OR a lot of patience for the install as well, it does take a few "trust me?" and cups of patience to get it all installed, you also need to install the drivers for the Stellaris Launchpad itself. Read everything! Youīll thank yourself later. It should take no more than 30 mins to an hour to get it up and running including reading and understanding the docs, but no fuzz if it takes 3-4 hours - as long as you have fun, thatīs the important thing here.

Itīs been a while since I saw C programming, and I donīt remember much (wasnīt that much of a C coder anyway, mostly Assembly here), but C is the way to go I think.

here we go...

TIīs coding environment is huge, but fortunately relatively easy to understand straight away. I started with the program "blinky.c" which sort of remind me of the first program I did with the 87c51 microcontroller I used for the RoboCup competition (for those of you in here who remember how I started out with Microcontrollers in here).

The entire way things are set up, are way different than what I am used to, Iīm used to straight assembly and direct adressing...here itīs not QUITE that straight forward, but the example programs included with the Stellaris - makes it relatively simple to get started.

Iīve learned that the best way to get started with code is to cutīnīpaste and experiment with numbers and code, thatīs how I did it before, and that works pretty well here as well.

My first babysteps:

The Blinky.c code - shows a simple way to make the onboard (RGB) led blink. And it blinks green with the included code. It took some fiddling around to make it blink Red Green and Blue, but that was my goal in order to understand how the adressing and code works, took about 20 minutes to "figure" that out without looking up references.

Tim would propably do this with 3 lines of code whereas I probably would use 30-40 lines of code, but then again...not exactly a rutined coder, more of a graphics artist with a taste for electronics, but itīs intriguing me to bits, because I have so many "plans" what to do with these toys.

Plans...

I sat around and fiddled with my new toy I got from Denmark as you may remember from another SCORE thread under the General Discussions forum, I scored a TV-Sat Analyzer with a crude spectrum analyzer built in. I was scanning the skies, and found 434 Mhz to be full of interesting data Iīd like to check out on my pc later on...like the TEMP & HUMIDITY data from these wireless devices around.

Messing around, I found something that someone...here on the forum sent me once, itīs a wireless receiver/transmitter for the 434mhz band, so I kind of put the two together. My goal here must be hooking that baby up to the Stellaris and read the pulses, see if I can decode them later on.

Fun stuff.