Tools Hack Daily: NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit GEMMA M0 – Miniature wearable electronic platform

Thursday, July 27, 2017

NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit GEMMA M0 – Miniature wearable electronic platform

The Adafruit Gemma M0 may look small and cute: round, about the size of a quarter, with friendly alligator-clip sew pads. But do not be fooled! The Gemma M0 is incredibly powerful! We’ve taken the same form factor we used for the original ATtiny85-based Gemma and gave it a power up. The Gemma M0 has swapped out the lightweight ATtiny85 for a ATSAMD21E18 powerhouse.

The Gemma M0 will super-charge your wearables! It’s just as small, and it’s easier to use, so you can do more.

The most exciting part of the Gemma M0 is that while you can use it with the Arduino IDE, we are shipping it with CircuitPython on board. When you plug it in, it will show up as a very small disk drive with main.py on it. Edit main.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 Gemma M0 and your code will go with you.

Here are some of the updates you can look forward to when using Gemma M0:

Same size, form-factor, and pinout as classic Gemma
Updating ATtiny85 8-bit AVR for ATSAMD21E18 32-bit Cortex M0+
256KB Flash – 8x as much as 8 KB on ATtiny85
32 KB RAM – 64x as much as 512 bytes on ATtiny85
48 MHz 32 bit processor – 6x as fast as ATtiny85 (not even taking into account 32-bit speedups)
Native USB supported by every OS – can be used in Arduino or CircuitPython as USB serial console, Keyboard/Mouse HID, even a little disk drive for storing Python scripts. (ATtiny85 does not have native USB)
Can be used with Arduino IDE or CircuitPython
Built in RGB DotStar LED
Three big-hole sew-pads can be used for conductive thread or alligator-clips for fast prototyping
Each I/O pad can be used for 12-bit analog input, or digital input/output with internally connected pullups or pulldowns
We gave the M0 pads the exact same names as the original Gemma so all your existing Arduino code will work exactly the same as-is without changes
True analog output on one I/O pad – can be used to play 10-bit quality audio clips
Two high speed PWM outputs on other two I/O Pads – for servos, LEDs, etc
All three pads can also be used as hardware capacitive touch sensors with no additional components required
Can drive NeoPixels or DotStars on any pins, with enough memory to drive 8000+ pixels. DMA-NeoPixel support on one pin so you can drive pixels without having to spend any processor time on it.
Native hardware I2C or Serial available on two pads so you can connect to any I2C or Serial device with true hardware support (no annoying bit-banging)
Same Reset switch for starting your project code over
On/Off switch built in
JST battery connector for plugging in AAA’s or LiPoly battery (no built-in LiPoly charging so it is safe to use with NiMH/Alkalines)