My MSP430FR6820 project is almost finished and ready for production. It is time to upgrade my CC26xx Flash Programmer for it. For this, the programmer is also redesigned so that 4 sockets are put in a line. It will be more convenient for operator to use.
Though there are many other options to program MSP430. There is advantage using this programmer. One of the benefits is it can automatically add different "serial number" to an assigned memory location. This feature, according to my experience, is very important for production control. And it is sure that I can add more features to help production.
The programmer uses the BSL with UART interface built in MSP430. The default baud rate is 9600 but can be changed. I choose 115200 which is pretty stable and fast enough for most applications. In my test, the time to program a chip is only few seconds. It is probably because there is only 32KB FRAM in MSP430FR6820. For others, the time will be longer if FRAM size is larger. But the actual time depends on the actual program size.
For MSP430 with FRAM, there is no need to "erase" flash memory. And the speed to program data into FRAM is pretty fast. So, the total time to program a chip is massively reduced. Though FR6820 is my first MSP430 project using FRAM, I am very impressed with the flexibility of FRAM. I can say that I will choose MCU with FRAM as possible as I can for future projects.
More information about MSP430 BSL can be found at http://www.ti.com/tool/mspbsl.
