Installing an MSP430 Toolchain

GNU Compiler Collection & GDB

To install GCC for the MSP 430 , go to the Downloads section of this page and grab either the gcc source and the header and support files or the precompiled binaries:

If you’ve grabbed the precompiled binaries ruin the install script with sudo privileges.

Otherwise create a folder for the source-code to reside (e.g. /opt/TI/) and extract the source. Once extracted, change to the source-full directory and run bash README-build.sh. This will download all the required dependencies from the internet and compiling them, leaving the binaries in the install folder. Finally, make a folder in the /opt/TI/ directory called msp430_toolchain and copy the contents of the install/usr/local directory into it.

NOTE: Compiling GCC from source currently does not produce a working C compiler, however the assembler seems to work fine.

MSPDebug

MSPDebug replaces msp430-gdbproxy used for creating GDB sessions with the MSP430. To install, clone the following GitHub repository to the /opt/TI directory created earlier:

Enter the new directory and run the make command. Then, copy the mspdebug binary to /opt/TI/msp430_toolchain/bin.

Building libmsp430.so

MSPDebug requires the libmsp430.so file to be built before it will run properly with Launchpad products. To build this:

  1. Download the MSPdebug stack source code from here: MSP Debug Stack

  2. Clone the hidapi source code from here: HID API

  3. Enter the hidapi directory and build using these commands:

./bootstrap
./configure CFLAGS='-g -O2 -fPIC'
make

  1. unzip the MSPDebugStack…. file using the command unzip <filename> -d MSPDebugStack

  2. Copy the hidapi.h file to MSPDebugStack/ThirdParty/include

  3. Copy hid.o to MSPDebugStack/ThirdParty/lib64

  4. Edit the Makefile by changing HIDOBJ := $(LIBTHIRD)/hid-libusb.o to HIDOBJ := $(LIBTHIRD)/hid.o

  5. Build using make

  6. Copy the libmsp430.so file to /opt/TI/msp430_toolchain/lib/