Texas instruments MSP430 microcontroller based portable multi-purpose instrument for android platforms

Day by day, more and more people use smartphones or tablets during work and at home. Most of smartphones operates from the popular Google's Android OS. Due to the ever increasing market requirements, these mobile devices evolving very rapidly, they have quite a large display or strong enough processor to visualize and evaluate measurement data on their screen, and they have enough computing capacity to perform signal analysis such as the real-time Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Another major advantage of the smartphones is the potential for wireless connectivity (e.g. Bluetooth). Based on this capability they can be used in laboratory measurements to display the results and the students can move around without the suspension of the measurements. This paper will show a multi-purpose test and measurement instrument, which is based on a low cost low power MSP430 microcontroller and is able to connect to an Android smartphone via Bluetooth. Combines several functions in one device, thus is a good opportunity to expensive instruments used in the laboratory measurements [1], [2].