Adafruit Feather M4 CAN Express with ATSAME51

One of our favourite Feathers, the Feather M4 Express, is being upgraded to the SAME51 chipset, which has built-in CAN bus support!
Like its SAMD51 cousin, the ATSAME51J19 comes with a 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 to support it, this is sure to be your new favourite chipset for CAN interfacing projects.

At the end of the board, we have placed a CAN transceiver chip and a 5V converter in order to supply the transceiver with 5V even in battery operation. The two CAN signal lines and the ground reference signal are available on a 3-pin 3.5mm terminal strip. The chip and the booster can be put to sleep to save power. The built-in CAN read or write packets and has support in Arduino and CircuitPython.

And best of all, it’s a Feather – so you know it works with all of our FeatherWings! What a great way to get started quickly. It’s even pin-compatible with the original Feather M4.

The most exciting part of the Feather M4 CAN is that not only can you use it with the Arduino IDE – and it’s damn fast if you do – but you can use it with CircuitPython as well. When you plug it in, it shows up as a very small drive with main.py on it. Edit main.py with your favourite text editor to build your project in Python, the most popular programming language. No installations, IDE, or compiler are required, so you can use it on any computer, even ChromeBooks or computers that you can’t install software on. When you’re done, unplug the Feather and your code comes with it.

The Feather M4 Can Express also comes with a Mini NeoPixel and 2 MB SPI flash memory. You can use the SPI flash memory like a very small hard drive. When used in CircuitPython, the 2MB flash acts as storage for all of your scripts, libraries and files. When used in Arduino, you can read / write files to it, like a small data logger or SD card, and then use our utility to access the files over USB.

FEATURES:

• ATSAME51 32-bit Cortex M4 core with 120 MHz, 32-bit, 3.3 V logic and power
• Hardware CAN bus support with built-in transceiver, 5V booster and terminal connection.
• Floating point support with Cortex M4 DSP commands
• 512 KB Flash, 192 KB RAM
• 2 MB SPI FLASH chip for storing files and CircuitPython code
• No EEPROM
• 32.768 KHz crystal for clock generation & RTC
• 3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output
• USB Type-C connector for native USB support, with USB bootloader and debugging via serial interface
• Built-in crypto engines with AES (256 bit), real RNG, pubkey controller
• Tons of GPIO! 21 x GPIO pins with the following options:
  • Dual 1 MSPS 12 Bit True Analog DAC (A0 and A1) – can be used to play 12-bit stereo audio clips
  • Dual 1 MSPS 12 bit ADC (6 analog pins, some on ADC1 and some on ADC2)
  • 6 x hardware SERCOM – native hardware SPI, I2C and serial all available
  • 16 x PWM outputs – for servos, LEDs, etc.
  • I2S input and output
  • 8-bit Parallel capture controller (for camera / video input)
• Built-in 100mA Lipoly charger with LED charge status indicator
• Pin # 13 red LED for general flashing
• Power / enable pin
• 4 mounting holes
• Reset button

Package Includes:

1 x Adafruit Feather M4 CAN Express with ATSAME51