I’m wanting to move into working with the full range of MSP430 chips, especially their Ultra Low Power versions.
As I understand it, I’ll need the chip I want to program, a JTAG programmer, and the target board in order to do prototyping.
Considering that I want to target the MSP430L092SPWR in particular (to begin with), I’m a bit confused about a couple of the pieces of hardware I need to complete the task (from what is on offer), and would like another opinion before I put money on it (this is purely for enthusiast learning).
So far, I believe I need the MSP-FET to actually program the chip (an aside, is there an alternative to the TI programmer I should consider?), but I’m unsure about the target board. The chip in question has 14 pins, but there are two target boards on offer. One is $20, and the other is $89, but as far as I can tell, they should achieve the same thing.
Can someone confirm/explain this for me? $20 vs. $89 is quite the difference in price, so I’d quite like to know why it is the case. Could someone that has used these before lend a hand?