HackSpace Magazine Issue 73 features the Adafruit Metro M7 with Airlift.

The NXP iMX RT1011 that sits at the heart of the Adafruit Metro M7 is, frankly, a ridiculously powerful microcontroller. It’s based on the Arm Cortex-M7 core and runs at 500MHz. Twenty-two of the microcontroller GPIO pins are broken out in the classic Uno (what Adafruit calls Metro) style. This means that there’s already an ecosystem of shields that can go on top to provide additional hardware, though the majority of these shields come with support for the Arduino programming language rather than CircuitPython, and many are 5 V, while this board runs at 3 V.

Alongside the main powerful microcontroller, there’s a second microcontroller – an ESP32 that’s used for wireless networking. In theory, this can do both WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy, but at the moment, there’s only support for WiFi. Adafruit calls this setup, using a secondary ESP32, Airlift.

We tested the Metro M7 Airlift that includes wireless connectivity and costs $29.95, but there’s also a version without wireless (and with an SD card port) that comes in at $19.95.

The Metro M7 Airlift is the only Wi-Fi-enabled M7 board that we’re aware of, so if you need both oodles of power and network connectivity, then this is a good choice.  CircuitPython support is great, as you would expect of a board from Adafruit.

Read more in HackSpace Magazine pp 92-93, download PDF, buy now, subscribe.