Are you looking for ways to decrease your bill of material costs? Perhaps reduce the number of components on your board? Adding a microcontroller to handle housekeeping functions in your design could be a great way to do this? 

By using a small, low-cost microcontroller for simple housekeeping functions such as driving LEDs, I/O expansion, and more, you can cut down the number of discrete analog components needed in your design. A housekeeping MCU is not the main host processor in the system, but it can handle several important system-level functions. 

Let's get started with walking through our housekeeping training series. You can find all of our resources at training.ti.com under MSP housekeeping MCUs. Each example in this series has useful content, in both English and Chinese, that can help you get started quickly in evaluating MSP MCUs. 

All you need is an MSP LaunchPad that can be obtained for less than $10 to run each example. Each housekeeping training video is also supplemented with a GUI for evaluation, code for running the function on your MSP LaunchPad and a technical note with implementation details. 

Once you have your LaunchPad, the code can be flashed to the device and running in less than five minutes. You don't even have to write a line of code if you don't want to. GUIs for each example can be used alongside the LaunchPad to test out different settings for each housekeeping function. 

Once you are ready to start developing, depending on your system design, you can choose to mix and match different functions that are implemented throughout the housekeeping training series. This can be done in either Code Composer Studio, a desktop IDE, or CCS Cloud, which is a cloud ID. In CCS Cloud, you can take two or more code examples, combine them into one project, and flash them to your device directly from your web browser. 

Every month, more examples will be added to the MSP housekeeping training series. Get started today with this training so you can take advantage of the cost savings or size reductions and simplicity that comes with adding a housekeeping MCU to your system.