Wiring TI Launchpad

[Cecil]

I too would love to see a breakout board of sorts. For the past 4 years, we used the Cypress board with this breakout. We had no problems with it, and they are still working today. For now, we have ordered ribbon cables and will probably make our own lexan enclosure, but some sort of breakout would be great to see happen!

[RaMoore]

Originally Posted by Cecil

I too would love to see a breakout board [...]

Thanks for the feedback! We are definitely going to see if we can get approval to make an FRC specific breakout for future seasons.

[Crossle86]

Rachel,
Thanks for quick and informative reply. It appeared to me that the BOOSTERXL should work but I could find no confirmation. Two follow up questions:

1) Given that the MSP and Boosterxl will be enclosed in the driver station, I'm not sure where your concerns about the robustness of the Boosterxl come from. It would seem to me the screw terminals would be adequate for DS application. Am I missing something?

2) Just to clarify, when you say ribbon cable "breakout", do you mean manually separating the conductors of the cable or is there some other way to do that?

[RaMoore]

Richard,

Originally Posted by Crossle86

1) Given that the MSP and Boosterxl will be enclosed in the driver station, I'm not sure where your concerns about the robustness of the Boosterxl come from. It would seem to me the screw terminals would be adequate for DS application. Am I missing something?

If properly strain relieved and everything is secured in the driver station, the screw terminal are probably fine.

However not all teams are nearly so careful with their wring and screw terminals are terrible under strain and then you add in all the vibration from being carried on bumpy cart rides, tossed around, knocked off the driver station shelf, picked up by wires, etc... these can all cause screws to start to loosen. Same reason why the mechanical guys use the lock nuts or thread lock. These loose screws can cause a wire to come out, or worse, an intermittent contact issue.

We had considered trying to push through a new breakout for this year, but we were just too resource limited to do a great job since most of the development for this project is done on top of our normal day jobs. Rest assured, a new breakout is very high on the list for next season's projects.

Originally Posted by Crossle86

2) Just to clarify, when you say ribbon cable "breakout", do you mean manually separating the conductors of the cable or is there some other way to do that?

You're correct, just separating the conductors for the ribbon cables. Once the LaunchPad is mounted down, the ribbon cables make a good solid connection to the board headers and the color coded wires make wire tracing easier. Our team found it pretty easy to then solder these wires directly to panel mounted buttons.

Since it's a standard .1 pitch header, someone also probably makes a PCB breakout you can attach to as well, but since you can just directly use the BOOSTXL-IOBKOUT it's probably not advantage to look for one--just mind the silkscreen won't match.