MSP430 custom ezFET Lite

Summary

Texas Instruments has a range of 16 bit microcontrollers, the MSP430. To program these require what they call a Flash Emulation Tool (FET).

Thankfully all their affordable development kits contain a small stripped down FET, known as the ezFET Lite. TI has open sourced this design and provide both the firmware and the schematics. I was given a tag-connect cable as a giveaway through the 43oh, MSP430 community forum. I decided to create a custom PCB to connect directly to the tag-connect cable.

Here is a forum post I made when I’d designed this: https://forum.43oh.com/topic/5530-custom-ezfet-lite/

Schematic

Downloads

This design was done in Altium when I was still studying at uni and had a “cheap” licence.

• ezFet_lite_tagConnect_0_01.zip

v0.1 had some issues around the inrush current and lack of bulk capacitance causing it to disconnect from the host when attached to a target. I designed a v0.2 that had these fixes, but unfortunately did not save those files.