As you know, competition among manufacturers of microcontrollers is very high. Everyone tries to entice consumers with a low price and advanced functionality of their stones.
The company Texas Instruments, for promotion to the masses of its MSP430 controllers, offers a cheap ($ 4.30) debugging board
LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) . Outwardly, it resembles Arduino, but, naturally, it is not compatible with it. Complete with the board, generous Texans put at once two of their Value Line microcontrollers in DIP packages: msp430g2553 and msp430g2452.

Of course, these controllers are quite spartan in terms of peripherals onboard (for example, compared to the same AVR in the Arduino), but, on the other hand, MSP430 are among the leaders among microcontrollers in terms of energy saving. It was precisely the low energy consumption that was the fad of the MSP430 when TI first released them to the market in 1999.
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As an IDE for its controllers, TI offers Code Composer Studio (based on Eclipse) and IAR Embedded Workbench KickStart. Both development environments have free download versions.
Recently, another IDE appeared -
Energia . This is fork of the Arduino development environment for MSP430 controllers.

So far the program supports only three controllers: msp430g2231, msp430g2452 and msp430g2553.

Programming in Energia is no different from that in the Arduino environment. For people who have mastered Processing / Wiring in Arduino, the transition to a cheaper LaunchPad will be inconspicuous.

Having such an easy-to-learn development environment for newbies like
Energia and distributing your LaunchPad for practically nothing (for only $ 4.30 including FedEx's free shipping worldwide), Texas Instruments can be a good competitor to Arduino (for example, 1290 rubles at
Ampere ).
References:Texas Instruments LaunchPad MSP-EXP430G2Read WikiVisit websiteView real-world usage examplesReview on HabréOrder yourself!EnergiaDownload (Windows and Mac OS X versions available)Read WikiParticipate in the forum