Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform started by Robert Wessels in January of 2012 with the goal to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad. The Energia IDE is cross platform and supported on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. Energia uses the mspgcc compiler by Peter Bigot and is based on the Wiring and Arduino framework. Energia includes an integrated development environment (IDE) that has it’s foundation in the Processing IDE (Processing→Wiring→Arduino→Energia). Energia is also a portable framework/abstraction layer that can be used in other popular IDEs. Utilize a web browser based environment with Texas Instruments CCS Cloud at dev.ti.com or TI’s powerfull CCS Desktop IDE.

The foundation of Energia and Arduino is the Wiring framework that was developed by Hernando Barragan. The framework is thoughtfully created with designers and artists in mind to encourage a community where both beginners and experts from around the world share ideas, knowledge and their collective experience. The Energia team adopts the philosophy of learning by doing and strives to make it easy to work directly with the hardware. Professional engineers, entrepreneurs, makers, and students can all benefit from the ease of use Energia brings to the microcontroller.

Energia started out to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 LaunchPad. Texas Instruments offers a MSP430, MSP432x, TM4C, C2000, CC32xx and CC13xx LaunchPad. The LaunchPad is a low-cost microcontroller board that is made by Texas Instruments. The latest release of Energia supports the majority of the LaunchPad product offerings. Energia introduces a

Together with Energia, LaunchPad can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. LaunchPad projects can be stand-alone (only run on the Target Board, i.e. your LaunchPad), or they can communicate with software running on your computer (Host PC). You can also add wireless modules to enable communication over various types of RF including Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth, Zigbee, cellular, and more.