I now have completed Part 2 of the article where I discuss the ansible playbook to deploy the firmware.
I have recently started looking into all the DevOps tools that have constant articles on Hacker News and reddit lately. I use linux around my apartment for all my machines (mostly debian based) and wanted a better way to control and configure them. As someone that works with python often, Ansible caught my eye. After reading about this cool demo, I wanted to try out Ansible on a Raspberry Pi cluster of my own but also add in some MSP430s getting programmed.
For those that don't know MSP430 is a ultra low-power microcontroller made by Texas Instruments. A great starting point for information is the TI LaunchPad website.
As a side project I sought out an automated way to deploy MSP430 firmware images to MSP430F5529 LaunchPads connected to Raspberry Pis. The master ansible server is responsible for compiling of the MSP430 firmware images and then using ansible pushes the image to the Raspberry Pis which then program the firmware.
Here's a simple organization chart showing how the firmware images flow.
Since the Raspberry Pi will be doing the programming of the MSP430F5529 it will need a tool for downloading firmware images. MSPDebug is a command line tool for downloading to MSP430s and the rest of the blog post will cover compiling it for use on the Raspberry Pi.
All the following compiling steps were run on a Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian.
Compiling HIDAPI
The first step will be compiling HIDAPI. From their GitHub page, HIDAPI is described as "A Simple library for communicating with USB and Bluetooth HID devices on Linux, Mac, and Windows." The library is used by libmsp430.so that we will be building later on.
There are a few dependencies I found I needed to build the library, so go ahead and install those first.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
sudo apt-get install libudev-dev
Now we can download the source code for version 0.7.0 from their GitHub Releases Page. We'll download and build in a "build" directory.
mkdir ~/build
cd ~/build
wget https://github.com/signal11/hidapi/archive/hidapi-0.7.0.zip
unzip hidapi-0.7.0.zip
After extracting we can now build the library.
cd hidapi-hidapi-0.7.0/linux
make -j4 CXXFLAGS="-Wall -g -lpthread -lrt"
If the make successfully completes you should have a hid-libusb.o file located in your current directory.
Compiling MSPDebugStack
Disclaimer: Texas Instruments does not officially support the MSPDebugStack on Raspbian or the Raspberry Pi. This is meant as a learning exercise rather than a production solution.
Next step will be compiling the MSPDebugStack from Texas Instruments. The source is avaiable from the TI website.
There are a few dependencies we are going to need to install for this as well. Go ahead and run the following:
sudo apt-get install libasio-dev
sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev
Now we are ready to build
cd ~/build
wget http://www.ti.com/lit/sw/slac460k/slac460k.zip
unzip slac460k.zip
Now we need to copy the hidapi library we built previously and the hidapi header file.
cd MSPDebugStack_OS_Package/ThirdParty
mkdir include lib
cp -p ~/build/hidapi-hidapi-0.7.0/linux/hid-libusb.o lib
cp -p ~/build/hidapi-hidapi-0.7.0/hidapi/hidapi.h include
Now that we have the copied dependencies we can build libmsp430 library from the root of the package.
cd ..
make -j4 STATIC=1
Go ahead and grab a beer because this will probably take awhile on your Raspberry Pi. Once it's done though you will have a libmsp430.so in your current directory, run the following to copy your library to your library path.
sudo make install
Compiling MSPDebug
The final piece will be compiling MSPDebug itself. This is the tool that will actually program the MSP430F5529 in our automated deployment.
First let's install the dependencies:
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev
sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev
Now we can download the source and extract.
cd ~/build
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mspdebug/mspdebug-0.23.tar.gz
tar -zxvf mspdebug-0.23.tar.gz
Now we can compile the source:
cd mspdebug-0.23
make -j4
Once the process is complete you will have an executable file mspdebug, go ahead and install the file to your PATH by running
sudo make install
Testing MSPDebug
Now that everything has been compiled to run on a Raspberry Pi we can finally connect to our device using mspdebug!
Go ahead and plug in your MSP430F5529 LaunchPad and then launch mspdebug with the following commands. The first puts the libmsp430.so that we compiled previously in your linker library path and the second launches mspdebug. The arguments for mspdebug tell it to use the TI library (the one that we built) and to allow a firmware update if the debugger firmware is out of date.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
mspdebug tilib --allow-fw-update
If all works fine you should see something like this:
Indicating you are now connected to the MSP430!
Next Steps
Next we will be using Ansible to distribute MSP430F5529 firmware images to a group of Raspberry Pis which will then use the mspdebug tool to download to their connected LaunchPads.
If you had trouble following any of the steps or have suggestions/improvements for the guide please leave a comment below! If you're having trouble getting it to work and just want the binaries they are checked into my GitHub repository.