We have already covered a good number of Adafruit’s line of boards designed to support their new CircuitPython system. While these boards still interact with the Arduino ecosystem that we all love (or don’t), they shine while running the custom built python distribution that they were designed for. Most of these boards are similar to their predecessors, but with the upgraded computing power and extra features needed to support running an interpreted programming language on a small development board. Nowhere has this increase in power been more dramatic than with the Trinket M0. This minuscule board keeps the original Trinket’s form factor but adds quite the punch into the original’s space and cost.
The original Trinket was a really great product for those that wanted a very minimal board to just run simple tasks while not taking up too much space or sucking too many dollars from your wallet. The 8-bit, 8Mhz MCU with only 3 usable pins could at times though feel quite anemic. The specs on the Trinket M0, however, will leave a smile on your face. A 48Mhz processor is 6x faster than the original Trinket, it has 32x the storage with 256kb, and all 5 GPIO pins are fully usable by the user without interfering with the USB communications. There are other fun peripherals here too, three 12-bit analog in pins and one 10-bit analog out. A built-in Dotstar LED will help with feedback and provide some enjoyable visual output options too.
Getting started with all of the M0/Express boards is easy. They come ready to run Arduino but a quick download and flash lets you get into Circuit Python mode. From there you can create text files as code that will run every time they are saved to the device, no IDE or compilation needed.
This device is small enough to fit into almost anything, and I think will result in plenty of great embedded projects coming up and at under $9.
