What's smaller than a Feather but bigger than a trinket? It's an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express with the ATSAMD51 Microchip! Small, powerful, with an ultra fast ATSAMD51 Cortex M4 processor running at 120 MHz - this microcontroller card is perfect when you want something very compact, with a ton of power and a bunch of pins. This Itsy is like a high-speed train, with its Cortex M4 120MHz with floating point support and 512KB Flash and 192KB RAM.

ItsyBitsy M4 Express measures only 1.4" long by 0.7" wide, but has 6 power pins, 23 digital GPIO pins (of which 7 can be analog, 2 x 1 analog MSPS, and 18 x PWM out). It's the same chip as the Adafruit Metro M4 but really smaller. So it's great once you've finished a prototype on a Metro M4 or (next) Feather M4, and want to make the project much smaller. It even comes with 2 MB of built-in SPI Flash, for data recording, file storage or CircuitPython code.

The most exciting part of ItsyBitsy M4 is that if you can use it with the Arduino IDE, but it comes with CircuitPython base. When you plug it in, it will appear as a very small disk drive with.py hand on it. Edit main.py with your favorite text editor to build your project using Python, the most popular programming language. No installation, IDE or compiler is required, so you can use it on any computer, even ChromeBooks or computers on which you cannot install software. When you are finished, unplug'Itsy' and your code will run.


Here are some of the features you can find when using ItsyBitsy M4 :

• Same size, same shape factor as ItsyBitsy 32u4 and ItsyBitsy M0, and almost identical pinout.
• ATSAMD51 32-bit Cortex M4 heart operating at 120 MHz
• Hardware DSP and floating point support
• 512 KB flash, 192 KB RAM
• 2 MB SPI FLASH chip for file storage and CircuitPython code storage.
• 3.3V logic and power supply and 32-bit power
• Tons of GPIO! 23 x GPIO pins with the following capacities :
  •  Dual 1 MSPS DAC analog 12-bit (A0 and A1) - can be used to play 12-bit stereo audio clips.
  •  Dual 1 MSPS 12 bit ADC (7 analog pins some on ADC1 and others on ADC2)
  •  6 x hardware SERCOM - SPI, I2C and Serial native.
  • 18 x PWM outputs - for servos, LEDs, etc.
  • No I2S. We have no idea why but I2S is only supported on the 64 pin version of this chip and we could only adapt the 48 pin version. But there's a stereo DAC.
  • 8-bit parallel capture controller (for camera/video input)
  • 1 x Special Vhigh output pin gives you higher VBAT or VUSB voltage, to drive NeoPixels, servos, and other 5V-logic devices. Digital output with 5 offset levels for high voltage logic output.
  • Can drive NeoPixels or DotStars on any spindle, with enough memory to drive over 60,000 pixels. DMA-NeoPixel support on the VHigh pin so you can drive the pixels without having to spend processor time.
• Integrated cryptographic engines with AES (256 bits), true RNG, Pubkey controller.
• Native USB supported by all operating systems - can be used in Arduino or CircuitPython as USB serial console, Keyboard/Mouse HID, even a small disk drive to store Python scripts.
• Can be used with Arduino IDE or CircuitPython.
• Red LED integrated pine #13
• Integrated RGB DotStar LED
• Reset button and on pine
• Powered by USB or external output (such as a battery) - it will switch automatically.
• Comes preloaded with the UF2 bootloader, which looks like a USB storage key. Simply drag the firmware to program, no special tools or drivers needed! It can be used to load CircuitPython or Arduino IDE (it is bossa v1.8 compatible).

Each order comes with an assembled and tested ItsyBitsy M4, with connectors that can be soldered for use with a breadboard. ItsyBitsy M4 comes with CircuitPython programmed, but you can replace the code with Arduino if you wish.

So, what are you waiting for? Get an ItsyBitsy M4 today and be surprised by the ease and speed with CircuitPython !

Technical details

Product dimensions 35.9mm x 17.8mm x 4.2mm / 1.4" x 0.7" x 0.2" x 0.2".
Product Weight: 2.4 g / 0.1 oz