Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi – ATSAMD21 + ATWINC1500 (ID:3010) Adafruit

DESCRIPTION

This is the Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi w/ATWINC1500 – their take on an ‘all-in-one’ Arduino-compatible + high speed, reliable WiFi with built-in USB and battery charging.

Connect your Feather to the Internet with this fine new FCC-certified WiFi module from Atmel. This 802.11bgn-capable WiFi module is the best new thing for networking your devices, with built-in low-power management capabilities, Soft-AP, SSL TSL 1.2 support and rock solid performance. We were running our adafruit.io MQTT demo for a full weekend straight with no hiccups (it would have run longer but we had to go to work, so we unplugged it). This module is very fast & easy to use in comparison to other WiFi modules we’ve used in the past.

This module works with 802.11b, g, or n networks & supports WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption.  You can connect to your own WiFi networks or create your own with “Soft AP” mode, where it becomes its own access point (we have an example of it creating a web server that you can then control the Arduino’s pins). You can clock it as fast as 12MHz for speedy, reliable packet streaming. And scanning/connecting to networks is very fast, just a second or two.

• A highly-capable Cortex M0+ processor with a ton more I/O pins, lots of 12-bit ADCs, a 10-bit DAC, and 6 total SERCOMs that can each do SPI, I2C or UART (3 are used by the existing interfaces, leaving you 3), plenty of timers, PWMs, DMA, native USB, and more
• The ATWINC has much lower power usage, about 12mA for the WINC & 10mA for the ATSAMD21 with auto-power management on for the WiFi and no power management for the ARM. With manual power management, you can get the WiFi module to down to ~2mA by putting it to sleep.
• This is compared to the ESP’s ~70mA average current draw, and whose deep sleep mode requires a WDT reset.
• We also found that we could stream more reliably (less ‘bursty’) with the ATWINC, although altogether the ESP has higher throughput.
• You also don’t have to ‘yield’ all the time to the WiFi core, since its a separate chip. You get full reign of the processor and timing

FEATURES

• Measures 2.1″ x 0.9″ x 0.3″ (53.65mm x 23mm x 8mm) without headers soldered in. Note it is 0.1″ longer than most Feathers
• Light as a (large?) feather – 6.1 grams
• ATSAMD21G18 @ 48MHz with 3.3V logic/power
• 256KB FLASH, 32KB SRAM, No EEPROM
• 3.3V regulator (AP2112K-3.3) with 600mA peak current output, WiFi can draw 300mA peak during xmit
• USB native support comes with a USB bootloader and serial port debugging
• You also get tons of pins – 20 GPIO pins
• Hardware Serial, hardware I2C, hardware SPI support
• 8 x PWM pins
• 10 x analogue inputs
• 1 x analogue output
• Built-in 200mA lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
• Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
• Power/enable pin
• 4 mounting holes
• Reset button

RESOURCES

• Adafruit Guide/Helpsheet