Sunday, November 27, 2011

Building a JTAG Circuit

The TI MSP430F1611 processor comes with JTAG pins that can be used for programming or debugging.

It is unfortunate that the telosB platform do not have a ready made JTAG connector onboard. Therefore, I had to resort to soldering male pins onto the telosB platform in order to connect a TI MSP430 USB Debugging Interface (MSP-FET430UIF) to the telosB platform.


The picture on the left shows the telosB platform with the soldered male headers.


MSP-FET430UIF that enables debugging on the MSP430F1611 chip via USB

Pin output from the MSP-FET430UIF does not match the male pin headers on the TelosB platform

I encountered another problem after soldering the male pin headers on the telosB platform. The JTAG connector on the telosB platform requires another circuit before it can be connected to the MSP-FET430UIF.

Instructions to build this circuit are given on Page 25 of MSP Hardware Tools User's Guide

In a desperate attempt to reset the flash memory on the telosB platform, I quickly built the circuit to connect  the MSP-FET430UIF to telosB.



In comparison, the Firefly board has a custom made debugger board that enables a developer to debug as well as program the Firefly board.

Firefly Debugger Board





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