Santa fe brewing happy camper IPA

Nice and hoppy. Good balance. Cans are good for camping :) M: 4/5 K: 4/5

Flying dog golden ale

Meh. Not a bad blonde but not our favourite style. K: 4/5 M: 3/5

Moylands Hopsickle imperial ale

Wow strong hoppy bitter. K: 3.5/5 M: 4/5

Black sheep ale

Crystal malt on the nose. Nice bitter finish for balance. K: 3.5/5 M: 3.5/5

Oro de Calabaza: artisan golden ale

Wow carbonation. Climbed straight out of the bottle. Smells and tastes a bit like wine.

Kelly says chardonnay.

Aged in oak barrels. Even mentions wild yeast on the bottle. Interesting to try but wouldn't go looking for it again.

K: 2/5
M: 2.5/5

Launchpad msp430, mspgcc4 and Ubuntu

So after waiting a few months my Launchads finally showed up.

Great value, seems like they are worth the wait. A bit limited code wise, only 2KB of flash and 128B of RAM.

I'm hoping to be able to squeeze 1-wire bus code to read a DS1820 as well as some LCD driver code in there to do a small cheap temperature controller.

The default tools look windows only, but there are a number of guides around for how to put together a Linux based toolchain for the MSP430. Unfortunately they all rely on building the toolchain from sources.

The best one looks to be the one at HAD:

http://hackaday.com/2010/08/11/how-to-launchpad-programming-with-linux/

But there is a major shortcut. Someone has packaged mspgcc4 for Ubuntu.

https://launchpad.net/~adamhorden/+archive/msp430

It is slightly old, but works fine on 10.04

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/adamhorden/msp430/ubuntu karmic main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/msp430.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install msp430-gcc msp430-gdb msp430-binutils msp430-libc 

I still had to download and compile mspdubug but that was quick and easy.

The LED blink example in the HAD article worked first go.

Breckenridge & coastal fog amber ales

Not our favourite style, so low scores.

Coastal Fog
M: 2.5/5
K: 2/5

Breckenridge:
M: 2/5
K: 2.5/5

The CF was a little smoother for my taste but Kelly liked the
Breckinridge better.