The Arduino IDE supports a very wide variety of different manufacturers and chip architectures (such as the very unusual cores in the ESP32), yet MSP430 and other Texas Instruments chips require a second Arduino-like IDE (called Energia) to be downloaded and used instead. Why is this?
Would it not make sense to merge the two projects, or just add support for MSP430, etc., in the main Arduino IDE?
Is there some sort of licensing or intellectual property issue? I don't see one, since Energia uses Wiring and the GNU mspgcc.
Would it be difficult to make MSP430 be supported/included in the main Arduino IDE? It seems very strange to exclude all TI chips from the main Arduino IDE.
Another curious, but presumably directly related thing, is that there don't seem to be Arduino-layout-compatible boards with an MSP430. TI have their own limited and expensive range of "LaunchPad Booster" boards but it would be great to use Arduino-compatible 3.3 V shields (such as with the Due).
The TI chips seem to have somehow got cut off from the Arduino ecosystem. Some of the MSP430's are amazing devices, such as giving you a 16-bit microcontroller for only $0.17 or have a 24-bit ADC which I haven't seen in any Arduino chips. And they have very impressive ultra-low power modes.
Thanks.
[Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, but searching in the forum just gets loads of Spanish forum posts since Energia means energy in Spanish.]
bob32:
Would it be difficult to make MSP430 be supported/included in the main Arduino IDE? It seems very strange to exclude all TI chips from the main Arduino IDE.
I suspect that the TI chips have not been excluded for any reason other than the fact that nobody has yet created the code that would be needed. For example the reason the ESP8266 and ESP32 can be programmed using the Arduino IDE is because some non-Arduino folks went to the trouble of creating the code necessary to allow the Arduino IDE to be used.
I suspect that there are "complicated" licensing issues with "some" of the platforms. For instance, MSP432 support uses TI-RTOS, which isn't open-source. If they can't do all of the platforms currently supported by Energia, why try to do some of them...
When Energia guys began to work on their Arduino IDE fork (january 2012) , Arduino's board manager was not here !!
Nowdays it seems that changing the way is still too hard.... but feel free to help Energia guys !!
Boards Manager only added another option for installation of boards platforms. You can still use the old manual installation method. And if you do want to add Boards Manager installation support to a platform, it doesn't require any changes to the platform itself, you only need to create a package index JSON file and host it somewhere online (can be on GitHub if you like), as well as archives of each release. This seems a little complex at first, but it's well documented and it mostly just ends up being a copy/paste operation.
There was a change in the boards platform specification that happened during the switch from Arduino IDE 1.0.x to 1.5.x. The required changes are pretty minimal and also well documented.