Introduction to the C2000 LaunchPad

Before jumping into the middle, let me introduce myself - I'm a student studying computer engineering in Hungary, less than a year away from getting my degree, so I have to work on my thesis. Without going into the details, let's just say that at the moment, I need an MCU for PWM control, I2C communication, and some simple GPIO switching, plus, it has to communicate with remote devices over UART. More requirements might be added in the future.

I spent a couple days thinking what MCU to use - of course, the first that came into my mind was the Arduino. I have several of them, used for various rather simple projects and experiments - I actually have a couple ATMEGA328P chips and a programmer as well, I can say that I really like them - ATMEGA MCU's have a relatively short learning curve, I was able to make use of most parts of the hardware (ie. PWM, I2C, TWI/UART) without having to use the Arduino libraries at all (I used Atmel Studio, direct register access).

However, I have decided not to use an AVR/Arduino for my thesis. I always wanted to write about something new and interesting. Since half of the project is about the MCU and the software running on the it, I simply couldn't say too much new things if I used an AVR - there are plenty of guides and tutorials out there about it, as they're the most popular devices for hobbyists (thanks to their simplicity and effectiveness, I guess), a lot of the professors at the university know them in and out. Instead, I wanted to use something new and interesting - an MCU that is widely used in the industry, yet not known widely.

After some research, I came across the C2000 Real-time Control MCUs made by Texas Instruments. A bit of googling revealed that these powerful 32-bit microcontrollers are indeed widely used in industry for it's great processing, sensing, and actuation capabilities - for example, controlling wind turbines and various motors or fans. While my application doesn't really require all that processing power yet, this is a perfect chance to introduce myself into something new and exciting :). Funnily enough, the C2000 LaunchPad is a little cheaper than a genuine Arduino Uno, while being far more powerful. It contains the C2000 Piccolo F28027 MCU running at 60 MHz, which has a 12 bit 4.6 MSPS ADC, 64 KB flash, 12 KB of RAM and 40 I/O pins. It has everything on-board to start working on the C2000, including an XDS100 JTAG Emulator that enables real-time in-system programming and debugging via USB.

So I went ahead and ordered one from TI's online shop. After all that hacking of the OMAP4's (I'm a big fan of them), I really like TI anyways...

 

So, the launchpad arrived, and since I'm that type of guy who studies stuff while working on it (instead of reading materials before actually starting to work on something), I was wondering where to start. I noticed that other than the several hundred pages long datasheets and complex examples, there aren't many C2000 guides or tutorials for new users out there. So far, literally the only guides I found are on the Forty-two, and now? blog.

In the upcoming articles of the series, I'm going to try to create an easy to understand guide about the various parts of the hardware by going through the various parts of my project, including the usage of the PWM, I2C and UART modules. I'm going to assume that you have installed the latest CCS (6.1.3 at the time of writing this article) and controlSUITE (3.3.9) to their default locations.

In the next article, we're going to get familiar with the jumpers on the launchpad, and we will write a simple code skeleton to be used for future projects.