Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.
I then tried compiling the OpenChronos source code to build some custom firmware. In order to build the firmware, I had to install the following Mac Ports:
- sudo port install msp430-gcc
- sudo port install msp430-binutils (actually is probably installed with msp430-gcc)
- sudo port install msp430-gdb
- sudo port install msp430-libc
I then did a msp430-gcc -print-search-dirs to find out where msp430-gcc include files were. For me they install to the /opt/local/msp430/include/ directory. Following the Readme for OpenChronos, I did a sudo cp gcc/intrinsics.h /opt/local/msp430/include/.
When I tried compiling OpenChronos, the build failed with lots of warnings and quite a few errors. This is because OpenChronos was built using the older msp430-gcc4 project. I fixed the compiler warnings/errors and built an image. I copied the generated build/eZChronos.txt file over to my Chronos-Control-Center directory, and uploaded the image to my watch. Everything seemed to work OK, and the watch is currently running my newly compiled custom firmware!