HackSpace_-_October_2019

FIELD TEST

VERDICT

The most

powerful hobbyist

microcontroller

available at

the moment.

9 / 10

Take a look at the box above for a comparison of
performance with other high-speed microcontrollers.
There’s no doubt that the Teensy 4.0 is, for almost
any case, the fastest microcontroller geared for
hobbyists by a factor of about three to five (depending
on exactly what you’re doing with it). There are a few
applications that can really benefit from this speed-up.
The Teensy range has been a favourite device for
people working with real-time audio, both because
they’ve historically been fast boards, and because
there’s a great set of support libraries written by Paul
Stoffregen (who also sells the Teensy boards). This
includes a drag-and-drop creator and a set of libraries
that help you write Arduino code to both create and
modify audio signals. The Teensy 4.0 is much faster
than the previous version (Teensy 3.6), and has four
times the memory. This means that you can do a
whole lot more. In audio terms, this means you can
do more computationally intensive effects, and more
of them.

AUDIO ADAPTORS
The Teensy 4.0 does work with the Teensy Audio
Adaptor Board, but the pins are in slightly different
positions, so you have to connect it with jumper wires
rather than soldering the two boards directly together,
as you could do with the earlier board.
Another area where powerful microcontrollers are
looking promising is running neural networks, such
as using the TensorFlow framework. At the moment,
there’s a lot of work going on with this (we looked at
the SparkFun Edge last issue). On paper, the Teensy
4.0 looks like it would make a good platform for

this, and there is some support for M7 processors,

but as yet, there’s not a straightforward process for

getting all this running. If you’re interested in running

TensorFlow on microcontrollers, it’s certainly worth

keeping an eye out for Teensy 4.0 support.

The Teensy 4.0 is a significant step up on

performance over any other hobbyist microcontroller

board, and available at a great price. If you find

yourself lacking the processing power to do what

you need, then there’s really no competition at the

moment – this is the board you need.

Below

The Teensy breakout

isn’t available for

sale, but you can

create your own

with instructions at

hsmag.cc/ZyDVhx

We ran a series of benchmarks on some of the fastest microcontrollers we’ve got, to

compare them to the Teensy 4.0. In each case, the benchmark result is the time taken to

complete a task intensive in that particular area. Lower is better.

BENCHMARKS

Benchmark Teensy 4.0 Teensy 3.6(240MHz)^ (SAMD51 – 200MHz)Adafruit PyPortal^ ESP32

Integer

arithmetic

6.00 38.00 40.00 54.00

Float

arithmetic 28.00 79.00 85.00 151.00

Double

arithmetic

30.00 620.00 739.00 614.00

GPIO output 65.00 271.00 451.00 265.00