Metro M7 with AirLift – Make: DIY Tasks and Concepts for Makers

The newest Adafruit Metro is the M7 with AirLift. The concept behind this board is to take a really highly effective Arm Cortex-M7 microcontroller, put it within the Arduino Uno’s kind issue, after which squeeze in a Wi-Fi subsystem alongside the sting. Adafruit then provides all of the extras discovered on their current boards. It’s a really busy board, however nothing feels misplaced or pointless. 

The board is constructed across the NXP i.MX RT1011, which is an Arm Cortex-M7 processor operating at 500 MHz. NXP calls this a “crossover” microcontroller as a result of it goals to have all the ability of an A-class utility processor and the real-time management capabilities of an M-class microcontroller in a single core. The chip has 128k of RAM, a floating level unit, and digital sign processing in-built. It makes use of exterior flash over a QSPI bus for program storage, with Adafruit offering 4MB on the board.

The chip has a whole lot of built-in peripherals, however a number of are of specific notice. First is USB 2.0 with OTG help. That’s, it might use quick USB to both pose as a consumer to a system or because the host to USB peripherals. It has varied on-board encryption {hardware} together with a true random quantity generator. The standard serial communication protocols are current together with SPI, I2C and USART.

The opposite microcontroller on the board is the AirLift Wi-Fi Co-processor. That is an ESP32 WROOM-32E from Espressif Methods, related to the primary microcontroller over SPI and communicated with through a CircuitPython library written by Adafruit. Given the enough specs on the ESP32 and its devoted objective, it ought to be capable of deal with most Wi-Fi wants.

The extras on the board embody standing LEDs, a NeoPixel, an on/off swap, and a Stemma QT connector. The Stemma QT connector gives energy and the I2C bus for connecting I/O peripherals and is suitable with SparkFun’s QWIIC.

As a result of we bought our fingers on this board early, there could also be variations between this board and the manufacturing boards. For instance, the silkscreen on the underside of our board claims 8MB of Flash, however we anticipate the marketed specs (4MB) on Adafruit’s web site will prevail [we have confirmed 4MB for the production boards -Ed.]. 

Adafruit have added a terrific walkthrough to get you up and operating with the board. First, there’s a web page on putting in the UF2 bootloader, which is barely wanted as soon as for a brand new board (Adafruit might presumably pre-install it sooner or later; verify their documentation while you get yours). Our prototype board appears to have its jumper switches oriented within the reverse of what’s depicted within the instructions, however in any other case we had been in a position to comply with them nice. 

The walkthrough then reveals you how you can obtain and deploy CircuitPython to the board. It additionally offers you an instance program to add to the board to verify your system is working by blinking the standing lights. Since Wi-Fi is a significant promoting level for the board, make sure to obtain and run the Wi-Fi instance program to make sure the board connects to your Wi-Fi community correctly.

It must be potential to program this microcontroller utilizing NXP’s toolchain as nicely, however we determined to stay with CircuitPython for its ease of use and help for all of Adafruit’s further {hardware}.

Standout options: 

• Wi-Fi is a good add
• Vastly elevated processing energy, with Wi-Fi offloaded to a second microcontroller