MSP430 interaction with Android Phone

Question

Hello everyone I am working on a class project that requires us to use Texas Instrument's MSP430 launch pad. The project I would like to do is have the MSP430 write "Hello World!" to the screen of my Android phone. However, I do not know how to get started. Can someone please direct me to where I could get some good reference material to get this project off the ground and if possible better insight on what I need to do to get started. Thank you all in advance who help.

Answer 1

First off, how are you going to connect your MSP430 to your phone? The MSP430 would need to be directly connected in order to do anything useful - the launchpad doesn't have the capabilities. I also doubt that you'll be tearing open your phone to try and solder the launchpad to it...

One solution would be to buy the TI BeagleBone Black (BBB) embedded kit and run Android on it. This would make the BBB act as if it were a phone. The difference here is that the BBB has plenty of I/O to wire up with the launchpad. It also has the capability of connecting a monitor and mouse. When you boot it up you'll be greeted with the typical Android UI.

Answer 2

If you need to use an Android Phone to interact with your microcontroler, you can use the FTDI chip for Android. It allows you to communicate, through serial communication, with any serial device. Your phone only needs to have USB host.

In addition, there are some other chips from FTDI to communicate through other stardar communications, such as I2c, SPI, GPIO or PWM.