What’s smaller than a Feather but larger than a Trinket? It’s an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express featuring the Microchip ATSAMD51! Small, powerful, with a ultra fast ATSAMD51 Cortex M4 processor running at 120 MHz - this microcontroller board is perfect when you want something very compact, with a ton of horsepower and a bunch of pins. This Itsy is like a bullet train, with it’s 120MHz Cortex M4 with floating point support and 512KB Flash and 192KB RAM. Your code will zig and zag and zoom, and with a bunch of extra peripherals for support, this will for sure be your favorite new chipset.
ItsyBitsy M4 Express is only is only 1.4” long by 0.7” wide, but has 6 power pins, 23 digital GPIO pins (7 of which can be analog in, 2 x 1 MSPS analog out DACs, and 18 x PWM out). It’s the same chip as the Adafruit Metro M4 but really really small. So it’s great once you’ve finished up a prototype on a Metro M4 or (the upcoming) Feather M4, and want to make the project much smaller. It even comes with 2MB of SPI Flash built in, for data logging, file storage, or CircuitPython code.
The most exciting part of the ItsyBitsy M4 is that it ships with CircuitPython on board. When you plug it in, it will show up as a very small disk drive with code.py on it. Edit code.py with your favorite text editor to build your project using Python, the most popular programming language. No installs, IDE or compiler needed, so you can use it on any computer, even ChromeBooks or computers you can’t install software on. When you’re done, unplug the Itsy’ and your code will go with you.
Here are some of the updates you can look forward to when using ItsyBitsy M4:
Comes assembled and tested, with headers that can be soldered in for use with a breadboard. ItsyBitsy M4 comes with CircuitPython programmed in.
Have some info to add for this board? Edit the source for this page here.
This is the latest stable release of CircuitPython that will work with the ItsyBitsy M4 Express.
Start here if you are new to CircuitPython.
Built-in modules available: _bleio, _pixelbuf, analogio, audiocore, audioio, audiomixer, audiomp3, bitbangio, board, busio, countio, digitalio, displayio, framebufferio, frequencyio, gamepad, i2cperipheral, math, microcontroller, msgpack, neopixel_write, nvm, os, ps2io, pulseio, pwmio, random, rgbmatrix, rotaryio, rtc, sdcardio, sharpdisplay, storage, struct, supervisor, terminalio, time, touchio, ulab, usb_hid, usb_midi, vectorio
This is the latest unstable release of CircuitPython that will work with the ItsyBitsy M4 Express.
Unstable builds have the latest features but are more likely to have critical bugs.
Release Notes for 6.2.0-beta.3
Built-in modules available: _bleio, _pixelbuf, analogio, audiocore, audioio, audiomixer, audiomp3, binascii, bitbangio, bitmaptools, board, busio, countio, digitalio, displayio, errno, framebufferio, frequencyio, gamepad, i2cperipheral, json, math, microcontroller, msgpack, neopixel_write, nvm, os, ps2io, pulseio, pwmio, random, re, rgbmatrix, rotaryio, rtc, sdcardio, sharpdisplay, storage, struct, supervisor, terminalio, time, touchio, ulab, usb_hid, usb_midi, vectorio
Every time we commit new code to CircuitPython we automatically build binaries for each board and language. The binaries are stored on Amazon S3, organized by board, and then by language. Try them if you want the absolute latest and are feeling daring or want to see if a problem has been fixed.
All previous releases are listed on GitHub, with release notes, and are available for download from Amazon S3. They are handy for testing, but otherwise we recommend using the latest stable release. Some older GitHub release pages include the same binaries for downloading. But we have discontinued including binaries as assets on newer release pages because of the large number of files for each release.
Latest version: v3.13.0
The bootloader allows you to load CircuitPython, Makecode, and Arduino programs. The bootloader is not CircuitPython. You can check the current version of your bootloader by looking in the INFO_UF2.TXT file when the BOOT drive is visible (FEATHERBOOT, CPLAYBOOT, etc.).
To update, first save the contents of CIRCUITPY, just in case. Then double-click the reset button to show the BOOT drive. Drag the update-bootloader .uf2 file to the BOOT drive. Wait a few tens of seconds for the bootloader to update; the BOOT drive will reappear. Check INFO_UF2.TXT to verify that the bootloader version has been updated. Then you will need to reload CircuitPython.