EZ430
I'm quite fond of the Texas Instruments EZ430 series of tools and target boards.
EZ430/FET UIF Protocol
Repeating the unpublished work of others, I reverse engineered the FET430UIF and EZ430 debugging protocols in sufficient detail to make a custom userland client for the devices with no proprietary dependencies. See the articles for more information.
EZ430 Repurposing
Recently, I've been attempting to repurpose the programmer board of the EZ430 to be an I2C/SPI adapter, among other things. My first article on the subject details the creation of a JTAG adapter, briefly compares the firmware of the red (RF2500) and green (F2013) target boards, and theorizes about the possibility of downgrading a red board to be a green board, for compatibility with Linux. My second article on the subject continues by describing the TUSB3410 chip of the target board, whose firmware must also be replaced for a successful downgrade. The third article of the series describes how to retarget MSP-GCC to build firmware for the device which is compatible with the original bootloader.
EZ430 in Linux
In November of 2007, I wrote a short article on the use of the TI EZ430 in Linux with IAR Kickstart that covers the use of the board, as well as the details of running IAR's compiler in Wine. A future article will cover the details of compiling RF2500 firmware in Linux.