Today was "MSP430 day" at the local Arrow dealer. This is a pretty marketing-based talk about the state of the MSP430. I went; these are usually pretty interesting, and there are useful discounts and/or freebies. There were a couple of things mentioned wrt LaunchPad:
- quite a few attending customers were annoyed by the long delays in getting they're ordered LaunchPad. They had about 10 that were handed out to the more desperate or deserving or something. Given (2), I elected not to be greedy.
- Supposedly a whole boatload (somewhat literally) shipped from the manufacturer (China?) on Monday. In another week or two, there should be a lot more of these in the hands of people who ordered them...
- Even the overly enthusiastic (hey, that's their job!) sales rep had played with a real Arduino and admitted that TI had some ways to go to match the "easy to use" part...
- They claimed to have shipped about 80,000 LaunchPads! (I'm not sure whether that includes the in-transit boatload) (nice to be part of a large-company marketing budget, eh?)