MSP430 LED alarm clock

MSP430 LED alarm clock

This is a project that I completed in 2012. It was an exercise I set myself to learn to program the low cost, and very low power, TI MSP430 microcontroller.

The challenge I set myself was to build a digital alarm clock using only a basic MSP430 and a 4 digit 7 segment display, watch crystal, piezo buzzer, battery and some push buttons.

The chip chosen was the MSP430F2001 which can be bought for about £1 and programmed with the very cheap TI MSP430 Launch Pad. This component has 14 pins and just 256 bytes of memory. Even so it’s possible to write a functioning digial alarm clock that drives the LED display directly, albeit at very low brightness.

See github.com/msaunby/msp430-gadgets for the code.