 Hey guys it's Parker Doman the Longhorn engineer and today my TI experimenter board came in. It's not the launch pad but it's kind of like the launch pad. It utilizes their new Fram memory which is ferroelectric random axis memory and it's the MSP EXP430FR5739 experimental board and right now of this video TI is having this 50% off if you go online and order it through their online shop at TI.com just going to open this guy up and looks like we got a little user manual here what's this say experimental product disclaimer hmm it says I have to sign this and return it within three working days it's kind of interesting so here's this is the board looks a little bit bigger than the launch pad open that up in a bit it's goodies we got some female headers it's always useful a little crystal same kind that came with the launch pad probably looks like a little 90-degree header for some reason and oh another USB mini cable probably got thousands of those now it looks like that's everything in the box take a look at the board so here's the board it looks close to the launch pad it doesn't have a socketed MSP430 and the headers are pre-soldered on with male headers it's got these boards down here when I understand you TI has other modules that you can plug into here I think they're wireless modules yeah USB normal stuff the cool thing about this board though it comes with an accelerometer let's see what that says oh it's an AXL335 you all don't know what that is that's a fairly standard three-axis accelerometer it's not a bad little piece of a chip to be on this board for for $15 I think is what it is right now $30 without the coupon that that accelerometer usually goes for about $6 to $9 so it being included on this board is a pretty good deal so apparently if you connect this up to your laptop there's a GUI that pops up with like some apps and stuff that are pre-loaded onto this MSP430 so let's go ahead and just do that right now let's see here sorry about the shadow guys it's got nice bank of LEDs too so we're gonna come up to here and I already downloaded this packet you can find it on the TI Fram website it's TI.com slash Fram if I recall and I extracted it and it has let's see I can go back so it has the drivers you need source code for the GUI then it has the experience which is the code and it has a lot of a lot of comments and stuff so it's actually really I've actually taken a look at it it's fairly easy to understand so I'm gonna go in here and go ahead and run the Fram GUI EXE that's gonna pop up this looks kind of cool so I guess how this works is I hit reset and then one of these buttons switches the modes is four modes and the other one turns that mode on so the first mode is supposed to be how fast it can write to its Fram memory second mode is how fast regular flash memory writes number three is the accelerometer mode and number four is there's actually a thermal resistor on this board right here up here so let's go ahead and try this out that's first mode selected I guess oh it's doing something so clearly they had it so it maxes out their gauge and so I guess that bar means I guess how fast it's going and then apparently Fram memory is supposed to be very you can write a lot to it like an e-prom you might be able to write a hundred thousand times to a certain block before the I guess breaks it's not the good word for it but that's basically what it does and this apparently you have one trillion is one trillion thing is about one trillion writes to a to the Fram memory which is a lot it's basically this thing would never die in terms of usability okay that's enough for that so you can see this percentage going down slowly that would take a while to go the way down so I switch modes I think this button oh it turned on the flash writing and it's going at 11 kilobytes per second which TI clearly shows that it doesn't register on the on the speedometer I bet you they designed it that way so you have 2000 kilobytes per second or 10 kilobytes per second it's clearly Fram's a lot faster if we're going to go by this user demo let's go to the next mode which is supposed to be a accelerometer and it's supposed to act like a bubble level so if you watch the LEDs get brighter that's a good way do it so as it tilts the LEDs light up it's pretty cool so I'm going to guess this only uses one of the accesses and I have taken a look at the schematic and all the accesses are hooked up to the Fram the MSP430 Fram chip through the part three I think it's 3.0 3.1 and 3.2 all use are hooked up to the accelerometer analog outputs okay so let's try the fourth mode which is the resistor yeah it's writing temp data at 44 kilobytes per second it's a lot slower than 200 200 2000 kilobytes per second hmm I guess I put my finger on this will heat up I think this is where it's at pretty sure that's where it's at maybe it's so hot out here in the garage that my fingers I haven't been doing anything to it it's about 95 degrees in the shed this is the 16 by 96 LDMD or LED dot matrix display which is light emitting diode dot matrix display that's kind of a long name but we'll roll with it and 16 by 96 uses 8 by 8 LED modules kind of like the test one and the FPGA board plugs in like right here with these sockets then the propeller communicates yeah the propeller communicates through this port and then these chips down here are ULN 2803s which allow the basically a transistor arrays so that you can sync more current into it because if you light up one entire row that's 96 LEDs times about 20 milliamps and so you're getting really close to 1.5 amps which is quite a lot for an FPGA to sync and so each one of these pins on the transistor arrays can sync 500 milliamps or 0.5 amps so there's three pins connected for each one and so you can sync 1.5 amps per line so if you lit up the entire display nothing should explode okay now later guys