Adafruit Feather M0 Basic Proto – ATSAMD21 Cortex M0 Adafruit

Feather is the new development board from Adafruit, and like it’s namesake it is thin, light, and lets you fly! We designed Feather to be a new standard for portable microcontroller cores.

This is the Feather M0 Basic Proto, it has a bunch of prototyping space built right in.

At the Feather M0’s heart is an ATSAMD21G18 ARM Cortex M0 processor, clocked at 48 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the new Arduino Zero. This chip has a whopping 256K of FLASH (8x more than the Atmega328 or 32u4) and 32K of RAM (16x as much)! This chip comes with built in USB so it has USB-to-Serial program & debug capability built in with no need for an FTDI-like chip.

To make it easy to use for portable projects, we added a connector for any of our 3.7V Lithium polymer batteries and built in battery charging. You don’t need a battery, it will run just fine straight from the micro USB connector. But, if you do have a battery, you can take it on the go, then plug in the USB to recharge. The Feather will automatically switch over to USB power when its available. We also tied the battery thru a divider to an analog pin, so you can measure and monitor the battery voltage to detect when you need a recharge.

Here’s some handy specs!

• Measures 2.0″ x 0.9″ x 0.28″ (51mm x 23mm x 8mm) without headers soldered in
• Light as a (large?) feather – 4.6 grams
• ATSAMD21G18 @ 48MHz with 3.3V logic/power
• 256KB of FLASH + 32KB of RAM
• 32.768 KHz crystal for clock generation & RTC
• 3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output
• USB native support, comes with USB bootloader and serial port debugging
• You also get tons of pins – 20 GPIO pins
• Hardware Serial, hardware I2C, hardware SPI support
• PWM outputs on all pins
• 6 x 12-bit analog inputs
• 1 x 10-bit analog ouput (DAC)
• Built in 100mA lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
• Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
• Power/enable pin
• 4 mounting holes
• Reset button

The Feather M0 Basic Proto has some extra space left over, so we give you a tiny little prototyping area. If you just need to attach a button or sensor, you may be able to skip out on a breadboard and wire it directly on there.

Comes fully assembled and tested, with a USB bootloader that lets you quickly use it with the Arduino IDE. We also toss in some header so you can solder it in and plug into a solderless breadboard. Lipoly battery and USB cable not included (but we do have lots of options in the shop if you’d like!)

Technical Details

• 51mm x 23mm x 8mm / 2.0″ x 0.9″ x 0.28″
• Weight: 4.6g
• Datasheets, schematic, PCB files, and Fritzing available in the product tutorial