The main driving reason behind selecting an MSP430 over other brands / styles of IC was mostly because of the excellent low power modes available. Also I have a fair few of these already around.

This model does not have a DMA so I will eventually be implementing an interrupt based I2C and SPI driver to help speed up communications while keeping the low power that made the IC desirable in the first place.

The LCD I plan to pair this up to needs the SPI interface, so unfortunately if a UART is added for external communications, it will be using a software driven driver instead of the hardware.

The plan is the have the LCD screen + 3 buttons to allow for entering and viewing the system status and a rough estimated state of charge (Voltage based initally). If space allows adding a set of LED's is also desired as a method of showing the status from a distance.