The C2000 LaunchPad joined our MCU LaunchPad ecosystem a year ago, bringing a new level of power, performance and capabilities to the LaunchPad portfolio. In honor of its first birthday, we spoke with one of the engineers that brought the C2000 LaunchPad to life. “I was thrilled when we brought the C2000 LaunchPad to market about a year ago. It was the culmination of months of hard work.” said Trey German, applications engineer for the C2000 microcontroller product line and primary designer of the board.
“The [C2000] LaunchPad excels in applications that interact with the analog world we live in. Traditionally we’ve interacted with the analog world using analog circuits, but as technology has progressed we’ve learned that there are substantial benefits to moving some of these controls into the digital domain. The performance of analog circuits is dependent on many factors including environmental, component tolerances and aging, as well as many others. By moving much of this analog control into the digital domain, we gain the deterministic nature of a digital circuit while still being able to interact with the world through the use of peripherals like the 12 Bit ADC or High Resolution PWMs present on the C2000 LaunchPad.”
When asked about possible application uses, German continued, “Commercially we see the C2000 LaunchPad used to control everything from motors to power supplies of all varieties. What’s even more exciting, though, is what we are seeing the community use the board for. The coolest application I’ve seen so far was a group of makers who used the C2000 LaunchPad to control an electromagnet using a PID loop. Through that, they were able to levitate a magnetic dart! I believe there may be a quadcopter dev kit in the works for the C2000 LaunchPad, but we will have to wait and see!"
From a software side, the C2000 LaunchPad is currently supported by both controlSUITE and Code Composer Studio (CCS). “These tools allow users to develop cutting edge digital real-time control applications using our free digital power, motor control, and solar coding libraries, but I’m most excited about another tool called Energia.” Energia has already revolutionized the community surrounding the MSP430 and Tiva-C LaunchPad by enabling users to write software using the Wiring framework. Wiring is an extremely easy to use framework that allows anyone (even those with no programming experience) to write software for the LaunchPad. “I’ve been working very hard to bring the C2000 LaunchPad into Energia and those efforts are paying off” said Trey. He continued saying, “C2000 Energia support is currently in development and is available in the Energia github repo today in the C2000 branch. Energia support for C2000 will be tested over the next few months and will hopefully be available in the fall.”
What’s the best thing about the C2000 LaunchPad turning one? For a limited time, you can get a C2000 LaunchPad for 50% off in the TI eStore! The C2000 LaunchPad comes with everything you need to get started as well as a rich hardware and software ecosystem. What are you waiting for?!? Join the MCU LaunchPad family today!
