Three new wireless kits from Texas Instruments give engineers a way to quickly work with RFID, short-range communication, and ZigBee wireless devices. These kits build on TI's earlier Stellaris DK-LM3S9B96 kit.

Not everyone needs a development or evaluation kit with all the bells and whistles. More companies could start engineers with a basic board that lets them get used to hardware and software and then add the I/O devices they actually need to take an evaluation closer to their actual design implementation. Facing a board with a dozen or so unfamiliar I/O devices might seem like an adventure to some engineers and a roadblock to others.

Freescale's new family of MCU-wireless chips give engineers a way to control devices via RF4CE links. The new chips will replace infrared controllers but make the transition smooth. They have Ir capabilities, too. RF protocols include ZigBee, RF4CE, SynkroRF, and plain vanilla IEEE-802.15.4 links.

The five-chip family of timing and pulsing chips--TimerBlox--from Linear Technology lets engineers quickly design circuits to create pulses, modulate pulse widths, serve as one-shot (monostable) pulse sources, and create timing delays. The SOT23 packages and 12 dev boards from LTC make it easy to breadboard and experiment with these 6-pin ICs that generally need only one, two, or three external resistors.

Get a handle on Texas Instruments' MSP430 MCUs with the $4.30 Value Line kit. The small MCU--2 kbytes or flash and 128 bytes of RAM--will work well in alarms, game controls, sensors, small consumer devices, electronic locks, light control, and similar applications that don't require a lot of code.