Looks like Texas Instruments is making a big push into the hobbyist microcontroller market with this new product called the Launch Pad. All microcontroller manufacturers have a development platform available so what makes this announcement by TI something special? The price! You can pick up one of these for only $4.30 with free worldwide shipping if you get it from the TI store. You might have to put your order in later in the day since I think this offer has crashed their order servers… Alternatively you can pick it up at Mouser for around the same price and a small shipping fee. The value line of microcontrollers that are Launch Pad compatible currently has a maximum flash size of 2K but that will soon change, as you can see by the roadmap below there will soon be many more powerful chips with as much as 16K of flash available.
TI MSP430 MCU Value Line Product Roadmap
