Hi All,

It's never been easier to get hold of a fast microcontroller in a breadboard friendly package.

The Teensy 4.0 was announced about a week ago and comes in a 24 pin DIP module.

It's based on the NXP 600MHz Cortex M7 and sells for $19.95.

With 2MB of flash and 1MB of RAM it's a useful board for proving ideas, or possibly emulating your favorite retrocomputer. Bit-banging VGA should be a breeze for a processor of this spec.

More details here: https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html

Brief Spec.

ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz
1024K RAM (512K is tightly coupled)
2048K Flash (64K reserved for recovery & EEPROM emulation)
2 USB ports, both 480 MBit/sec
3 CAN Bus (1 with CAN FD)
2 I2S Digital Audio
1 S/PDIF Digital Audio
1 SDIO (4 bit) native SD
3 SPI, all with 16 word FIFO
3 I2C, all with 4 byte FIFO
7 Serial, all with 4 byte FIFO
32 general purpose DMA channels
31 PWM pins
40 digital pins, all interrupt capable
14 analog pins, 2 ADCs on chip
Cryptographic Acceleration
Random Number Generator
RTC for date/time
Programmable FlexIO
Pixel Processing Pipeline
Peripheral cross triggering
Power On/Off management

Oh, that's quite the step up in performance! And with the tightly coupled RAM, even more so. Should be easily fast enough to emulate a RAM/ROM expansion of one sort or another, or any other interesting 8-bit peripheral. Or, as you suggest, a whole system.

But - as expected these days - not 5V tolerant.

Hi Ed,

Teensy 4.0 and 4.1 are now available in the UK from CoolComponents, Pimoroni, PiHut and HobbyTronics.

Check the PJRC site for a full list of their Worldwide Distributors.

Priced at between £18 and £29 they offer a small breadboard friendly form factor and at 600MHz at least 150% of the performance of the STM32H7xx devices.

With use of a suitable heatsink on the SoC they can be pushed to just over 1 GHz.

Needless to say I have ordered a small handful to continue with my cpu simulation explorations.

I opted for CoolComponents

https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/t ... ment-board

but PiMoroni is almost the same cost - and they also offer the PSRAM chipped needed to expand the RAM on the Teensy 4.1 to either 8Mbyte or 16Mbyte

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/8mb- ... teensy-4-1

As mentioned earlier on this forum the spec and features on these boards is awesome, and if you wish you can get as close to the metal as you wish.

PS - it's not a Raspberry Pi - so please don't offer any comparisons - they are chalk and cheese.


regards


Ken