The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi with uFL!
This is the Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi w/ATWINC1500 – our take on an ‘all-in-one’ Arduino-compatible + high speed, reliable WiFi with built in USB and battery charging. It’s an Adafruit Feather M0 with a WiFi module, ready to rock! We have other boards in the Feather family, check’em out here.
Connect your Feather to the Internet with this fine new FCC-certified WiFi module from Atmel. This 802.11bgn-capable WiFi module is the best new thing for networking your devices, with built-in low-power management capabilities, Soft-AP, SSL TLS 1.2 support and rock solid performance. We were running our adafruit.io MQTT demo for a full weekend straight with no hiccups (it would have run longer but we had to go to work, so we unplugged it). This module is very fast & easy to use in comparison to other WiFi modules we’ve used in the past.
This module works with 802.11b, g, or n networks & supports WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption. You can connect to your own WiFi networks or create your own with “Soft AP” mode, where it becomes its own access point (we have an example of it creating a webserver that you can then control the Arduino’s pins). You can clock it as fast as 12MHz for speedy, reliable packet streaming. And scanning/connecting to networks is very fast, just a second or two.
You might be wondering why use this when you can get a HUZZAH Feather? Well, you get:
- A highly-capable Cortex M0+ processor with ton more I/O pins, lots of 12-bit ADCs, a 10-bit DAC, 6 total SERCOMs that can each do SPI, I2C or UART (3 are used by the existing interfaces, leaving you 3), plenty of timers, PWMs, DMA, native USB, and more (check out the Datasheet)
- The ATWINC has much lower power usage, about 12mA for the WINC & 10mA for the ATSAMD21 with auto-power management on for the WiFi and no power management for the ARM. With manual power management, you can get the WiFi module to down to ~2mA by putting it to sleep.
- This is compared to the ESP’s ~70mA average current draw, and whose deep sleep mode requires a WDT reset.
- We also found that we could stream more reliably (less ‘bursty’) with the ATWINC, although altogether the ESP has higher throughput.
- You also don’t have to ‘yield’ all the time to the WiFi core, since it’s a separate chip. You get full reign of the processor and timing
Of course, both WiFi-capable Feathers have their strengths and tradeoffs, & we love both equally!
Note: This version does not come with an onboard antenna, you will need a uFL connector antenna such as 2.4GHz Mini Flexible WiFi Antenna – not included! We have a version with on-board antenna as well.
USE
The Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi with ATWINC1500 Guide provides all the details and use examples.
Projects:
Would you like to see this Feather in action? Check out the project below:
- Automatic Twitch On-Air Sign
- 3D Printed IoT On Air Sign for Twitch
- CircuitPython Hardware: PCA9685 PWM & Servo Driver
In stock! You can buy the Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi with ATWINC1500 with uFL in the Adafruit shop.