The MAX1555 chip is a charging regulator for Li-Ion batteries, and accepts anything up to 7V, so you can easily use a micro-USB port. The battery could be anywhere from a few dollars to $10 or so, depending on the capacity we pick.

I see another option is a SoC solution that I didnt even know ti made. the cc430 line

and regardless of which solution we go with the msp uses 220 μA / MIPS active so not to much if my math is right and the cc430 is right around there as well. So battery wise small should be fine.

220μA at full speed sounds very unlikely to me; what datasheet or tech specs are you reading for that?

its 220ua / mhz I think is what they mean by that.


this one under the spec section is labled 160ua/mhz

the radio chips arent included in that this is just the mcu the radion chips are at 15ma draw

Oh, it said 220uA per MIPS? That makes more sense to me (and keep in mind that depending on the architecture, one instruction is not necessarily one clock cycle. 🙂

yeah each one is labled slightly different lol. so now we need to go back to deciding on what chips we are actually using...hopefully hcwp tommorow will shed some light on that ^^

Well, if you take a look at the functional diagram for the
CC430F5133 (the chip that you linked to a few posts ago), you'll notice that it actually has a built-in RF transceiver, so there would be no need for the external CC2500 chip.

Y'know, I did some preliminary design work on a device like this somewhat recently- battery powered with a CC430 core. I should find those design files.

Some important considerations: the CC430's radio requires V_core of at least 2.2V to operate (it refuses to transition to an active mode if PMMCOREV is set lower than that), and a typical Lithium battery will swing between 3.7V-ish at full charge and (IIRC) down to around two when empty. You'll need some smarter power management than a simple linear regulator coming out of the battery.

How do you feel about something like the TPS61200 buck/boost converter, which can take 0.3V to 5.5V and output a fixed voltage between 1.8V and 5.5V? It would be even cooler if there was a chip that combined the functions of the MAX1555 and the TPS61200.

After pulling things up in EAGLE and checking, my CC430 system hadn't had any power supplies specced out. Another battery-powered system I specced out called for a BQ24090 charge controller and a TPS60502 regulator (it only required a 1.8V core voltage).

Some cursory browsing indicates that the TPS61200 may be a decent choice. I did a quick run through TI's regulator offerings and liked the look of the TPS63001, but there's a lot of choice available there.

Another thing to keep in mind: the MSP430's GPIO is not 5V-tolerant, so it will need some sort of protection or level shifter. Something like a TXB0102 (bidirectional 2-bit level shifter) will probably do the job there.

The radio itself needs some significant engineering, too. Here's what my design looked like, for example:
(The blue dashed line is a copper ground plane on the bottom layer to isolate the RF frontend from digital noise.)

http://www.ti.com/lit/ml/swru130b/swru130b.pdf

just dropping this here for referance its the info sheet on the simpliciti stack and routines

http://blog.curioussystem.com/2009/09/setting-up-an-iar-project-using-the-ti-msp430-and-simpliciti/

TI has several different versions of their RF transceiver that cover different frequency bands, depending on frequency allocation and licensing restrictions, so keep that in mind when selecting parts.

Good to know, thanks. I believe that 433MHz is part of the ISM band; that's what Clove 3 is slated to use, and I hope that the CC340 can use it. I have been searching everywhere without actually finding concrete frequency numbers for the CC430, other than "sub-1GHz". Perhaps it's settable? Here's a nice candidate: CC430F5135, with 2KB of SRAM and 16KB of Flash, a handful of ADCs, some GPIO, etc. It would be nice to break out the ADC/GPIO so that people could use the Cn2.2 bridges to control hardware with their calculators. I might try to grab samples of that.

Also, application note: SimpliciTI on the CC340

Last I checked the frequency is settable seeing as its a option built into the simpliciti software.

And that application note link is quite useful thanks for the link 😁

From the very beginning of the CC1101 users manual (CC430s use the same radio core as the CC1101):
When programming frequencies, you basically set a base frequency and channel spacing, then you can channel-hop easily. You really only need to be concerned with frequency when selecting an antenna in this case.

Tari, aha, I see that now; sorry to be noobish in my datasheet-searching. Considering that in quantity the CC430 is around $2.75, it's probably a good choice.

Edit: Oooor $5.71 on Mouser for 1. Ah well. That QFN48 package would/will be a party to get soldered.

If you go to avnet instead of mouser and get the CC430F5135IRGZ (which as far as i can tell the only difference is the standard batch size) its only $3.4 a pop instead of $5.7

Ah, I didn't even think of looking there! Great thinking. So where are we in deciding on what we're going to do? It sounds like we're gradually narrowing in on quite a small parts list.

Well im still learning how to use the simpliciti stack because once one person knows its easier for others to learn lol. Parts wise we are at

1 cc430
1 voltage regulator
1 level shifter
1 battery

correct?

Yup, plus whatever miscellaneous passive components are necessary, a wire antenna, and possibly a charging controller for the battery. Unless we make it internal, in which case we can toss the battery and the charging controller, but I am quite uncomfortable with the cheating implications there. 🙂

Edit: Oh, and I totally agree; I will be nagging you to share everything you learn about SimpliciTI once you get a handle on it.