9

FIELD TEST

f you are wondering which Feather

board should be your first, then look

no further than the Adafruit Feather M0

Express, featuring the ATSAMD21 Cortex

M0. Why? Well, it’s simple. This board is

at a great price point, and it allows you to

develop your code via the Arduino IDE, MakeCode,

or CircuitPython.

And that’s just the beginning! The Feather M0

features 20 GPIO pins, 256kB of on-board flash

memory, 32kB of RAM, a NeoPixel LED, 2MB SPI

flash, USB port, LiPo battery-charging circuitry, and a

small prototyping area. Keep in mind that all of those

features are packed into the Feather form factor of

only 2” × 0.9” × .28” (51 mm × 23 mm × 8 mm). Do

you need any more reasons to love this board?

Don’t overlook the fact that it supports

CircuitPython. This is a big deal, especially in the

educational market. The board comes preloaded with

the UF2 bootloader. This means all of your code can

be dropped on the board, just like saving a file to a

USB drive. No compiling, no uploading to the board,

and more importantly, no drivers needed. It’s really

simple and works on a wide array of computers.

I

ADAFRUIT $19.95 adafruit.com

Adafruit Feather M0 Express

Don’t overlook the fact that

it supports CircuitPython.

This is a big deal, especially in

the educational market. The

board comes preloaded with

the UF2 bootloader

”

”

Designed for CircuitPython – ATSAMD21 Cortex M0

Hard to go

wrong with

this simple

Feather board

VERDICT

10 / 10

Adafruit is continuing to develop the Feather

platform. It will be focusing on higher-powered

microcontrollers to better support CircuitPython.

And just on the horizon is a Feather that will feature

the 2.4GHz Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 that will

have native USB and Bluetooth LE. Adafruit is also

actively developing more boards that will interface

with other protocols like ZigBee, CAN, and LTE

cellular networks.

STILL TO COME

Above

The standard Feather

board in an ever-

growing ecosystem