The Capicitive Touch Booster Pack for the Launchpad

I took some time to play with the Capacitive Touch Booster Pack on the Launchpad. This kit from TI cost $ 4.30 during the initial 430 hours of release. I purchaed one because it looked cool. The booster pack is a shield-like board for the Launchpad that plugs into the headers. You must solder the male headers that came with the LP in order to connect a booster pack. The kit also comes with an 20 pin MSP430G2452 micro chip that is preloaded with the demo software. It was easy to hook up, although I could not find any where in the documentation that specified the orientation for the board. The demo provides a capacitive touch wheel surrounded by led's with a touch button in the middle. Very similar to the IPOD wheel interface. It also has a proximity sensor that wakes the board up when a hand is waved in front of it. The demo was impressive and worked right out of the box with no need to flash the microprocessor. TI provides an extensive library of sample code and a library of functions for the capacitive touch applications. Some day I may play with this some more and use the wheel in a hand held wireless remote for the quad.

Attaching an EZ430 RF target board to the Launch Pad

The Launch Pad development board provides unpopulated pads for adding a header so that a target board such as the EZ430 RF board can be attached to it. To connect one of the ez430 targets, connector J4 must be populated with a 0.050-in (1.27-mm) pitch male header, as shown in Figure 4, to connect the target boards. The part number for the header is Mill-Max 850-10-006-20-001000. I had a relatively hard time finding the header so I asked Mill Max for free samples and they graciously sent me a few. I would not normally ask for samples but in this case I could not find the header part. The manufacturer's will usually oblige requests if you are not greedy.

The header for J4 is very small and with the 0.05 in pitch it presented a challenge for my rusty soldering skills. One of the images shows the header part beside a ruler. I is a little over 1/2 an inch. The pads on J4 are close together on the Launch Pad. My hand shakes a lot more than it did when I was a youngster, but I was successful in soldering the connector to the Launch Pad. The target board was installed and all came up without a problem.

The EZ430 RF2500T target board is about 1 inch in length with an onboard chip antennae. In testing with my daughter we were able to maintain a connection outdoors for at least half a foot ball field distance. In my next post I hope to be able to share the results of experimenting with this setup to allow the two boards to talk to one another.