MSP430 Development Board

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Robot Shield V1.0 is a Booster pack for MSP430 Launchpad (MSP-EXP430G2) which can be used either as a

•    MSP430 Motor Control Booster Pack for Launchpad ,
•    MSP430 RS485 Communication Booster Pack 
•    MSP430 Robot Building Booster Pack for Launchpad. 

The booster pack is designed for the  MSP-EXP430G2 series Launchpad board from Texas Instruments.The Booster pack provides motor control and RS485 communication capabilities to the Launchpad board.

In this tutorial we are going to control two DC brushed motors remotely using RS485 protocol.The Motors are connected to the PC through a twisted pair RS485 cable and the software running on the PC controls the two motors.

The Software is written in both C sharp (C#) and Python so that they can be run on multiple systems like Windows,Linux etc.

The two DC motors are controlled using MSP430 Launchpad and Robot Shield (L293D + MAX485) and the RS485 twisted pair cable is connected to the PC USB port using USB2SERIAL (USB to RS485 converter).

In the previous article we learned how to control a dc brushed motor using MSP430G2553 and L293D motor driver chip,the main focus in that article was about starting and controlling the direction of motors.The motors were allowed to be rotated at their maximum speed.In this article we are going to implement a simple PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) based speed control for DC brushed motors using MSP430 Launchpad.

In this tutorial we will control two DC brushed motors using MSP430 Launchpad (MSP430G2553) and L293D Motor Driver IC (Robot Shield). L293D is a quadruple high-current half-H driver IC which can be used for controlling DC brushed motors,solenoids,relays etc.The IC contains 4 half H drivers which can be combined together to create two full H bridge circuits for controlling two DC brushed motors.The L293D is designed to provide bidirectional drive currents of up to 600-mA at voltages from 4.5 V to 36 V,Here we will be running the motors at 12V.