HUZZAH32 Feather

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dtiradar
 
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HUZZAH32 Feather

Post by dtiradar »

I guess I am a little confused with the M0 and M4 designation for the feather boards. I have the HUZZAH32 and I ordered a ADAFRUIT NEOPXL8 FEATHERWING FOR FEATHER M4 - 8 X DMA NEOPIXELS for it. I am having some issues with the example sketch provided. Is my Feather compatible with this feather wing?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: HUZZAH32 Feather

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Boards with ‘M0’ in their names have an Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller.. usually some variant of the SAMD21.

Boards with ‘M4’ in their sames have an Arm Cortex M4 microcontroller.. some variant of the SAMD51.

The M0 family is the simplest version of Arm’s 32-bit microcontroller designs. The M0+ family have a slightly larger instruction set.

The M4 family have additional features like Single-Instruction/Multiple-Data (SIMD) hardware and a DSP unit. SIMD is basically a large number of Arithmetic/Logic Units (ALUs) working in parallel.. if you want to multiply a whole block of data by the same number, a SIMD section can do the whole array in one step. DSPs are like a bank of programmable calculators that can pass data around. If you wanted to composite two image layers with transparency, a DSP can read the RGB components for a pixel in both images, take some fraction of both values, and add them together.


The NeoPixl8 was designed specifically for SAMD21 and SAMD51 microcontrollers, so the ESP32 doesn’t have the features necessary to produce the same kind of parallel-processed, Direct Memory Access (DMA) output. All the NeoPixl8 will do for an ESP32 Feather is provide level shifting.

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dtiradar
 
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Re: HUZZAH32 Feather

Post by dtiradar »

So this guy would be the correct processor to run some LEDs on a project?

Adafruit Feather M4 Express - Featuring ATSAMD51 - ATSAMD51 Cortex M4

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Re: HUZZAH32 Feather

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

That’s one of them, yes. The M0 version would also work.

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