Adafruit Feather M0 Express

The courier showed up today, with a really neat new board from Adafruit – the Feather M0 Express. It is essentially a break out board for the Microchip (formerly Atmel) ATSAMD21G18, which is the same ARM M0+ micro used in the Arduino Zero, plus a 2MB flash memory, RGB LED, and a LiPoly charger. It’s not too expensive at $20USD, nice and tiny, and I think could be a real hit.

Using the Feather M0 Express from Arduino IDE almost couldn’t be easier – just add the Adafruit Board Manager URL to your Arduino IDE settings, then install the “Adafruit SAMD Boards” – instructions at https://learn.adafruit.com/add-boards-arduino-v164 .

However, the really exciting new option available with this new board, is CircuitPython – Adafruit’s implementation of MicroPython. Getting setup for CircuitPython is super easy, though the documentation is still under development so it might seem a bit intimidating at first read. Here’s what I did:

1. Download the latest CircuitPython uf2 file for your board from https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython/releases
2. Connect the Feather to your computer via USB
3. Put the Feather in to bootloader mode by “double clicking” the reset button. You’ll know it works when the #13 LED starts fading on and off.
4. Copy the uf2 file from step 2, on to the FEATHERBOOT USB drive that should have appeared in step 3.  Wait a few seconds.

There should now be a USB drive available called CIRCUITPY, and a virtual serial port available.

Using your favourite serial console with the virtual serial port gives an interactive terminal, aka REPL, which can be used directly as below. Or, just save a source file as main.py in the CIRCUITPY drive to get your program to run at boot.

Adafruit CircuitPython 0.9.5 on 2017-04-14; Adafruit Feather M0 Express with samd21g18
>>> print("hi")
hi
>>> help()
Welcome to Adafruit CircuitPython 0.9.5!

Please visit learn.adafruit.com/category/circuitpython for project guides.

Built in modules:
 __main__
 builtins
 micropython
 array
(list continues)

Let’s make the “hello world” of embedded programming (but this time, done on-target using tab completion!):

>>> import digitalio
>>> import board
>>> import time
>>> with digitalio.DigitalInOut(board.D13) as led:
...     led.switch_to_output()
...     while True:
...         led.value = 1
...         time.sleep(0.5)
...         led.value = 0
...         time.sleep(0.5)