This repo contains scripts that help with installing and running mspdebug on a Raspberry Pi.
It installs some packages via apt, and the rest from source.
Before running, please make sure apt is up to date by running e.g. sudo apt install && sudo apt upgrade
To install, clone the repo and run setup.sh. Alternatively look into the steps folder to see each step that needs to be run.
If it ran successfully, you can now run mspdebug with your board connected, and you should be able to run stuff.
Tested on: Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 3 B+, using an MSP-EXP430FR2355 board.
This repo exists because I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi as a self-hosted runner to run unit tests on an MSP430 board using Github Actions.
TI provides a few ways to flash MSP430 boards, including Code Composer Studio, MSPFLASHER and Uniflash. All of these are available for Linux, but none of them are available for ARM processors like the Raspberry Pi.
One tool that is supported is Daniel Beer's mspdebug, which we can simply apt-get install. However, it needs an externally provided driver to connect to. After some staring at the manpage, it seemed like tilib would be a good choice. The name means that it uses a TI-provided dynamic library called libmsp430.so, which is part of TI's MSP Debug Stack. Once again, a prebuilt binary is available for Linux, but not for ARM.
This time, though, TI has actually provided the source code, so we can build it ourselves. First, we need to download and extract the MSPDS source files. This is done in the steps/downloads_mspds.sh script.
libmsp430.so has a couple of its own dependencies: Boost version 1.67, and HIDAPI version 0.8.0-rc1.
Boost is fortunately just an apt-get install libboost1.67-all-dev away.
I couldn't get the same to work with HIDAPI, but it's reasonably easy to build from source (see steps/build_hidapi.sh in this repo). The only quirk I saw was that the bootstrap script had to run twice.
Now for the tricky bit. According to the build instructions, MSPDS expects some of the artifacts from HIDAPI to be copied over to a folder called ThirdParty. The instructions say to copy hidapi.h into ThirdParty/include, and to copy hid-libusb.o into ThirdParty/lib. Now, I couldn't find any files called hid-libusb.o in the build folder, so I just tried the closest sounding thing which was libusb/hid.o. I copied this file into ThirdParty/lib and renamed it to hid-libusb.o. I also had to copy it to ThirdParty/lib64.
As awkward as all that sounds, it works: I just ran make STATIC=1 in the MSPDS root directory, and after several minutes I had a libmsp430.so. The final step was to copy it over to /usr/lib/ so mspdebug could find it.
The last step is to verify that it works. For example, mspdebug tilib --usb-list should show that a board is connected. You can then run just mspdebug to start an interactive shell, or do whatever you need to do from the command line (refer to the manpage for that).