I just picked up a new development toy, the Teensy 3.1. This thing looks pretty awesome, and it’s compatible with the Arduino 1.0.5 IDE which is great for me.
The Teensy 3.1 has a lot of great features that lends itself to being used in my projects. Just the pinout on the device shows that it’s quite flexible, and it’s very compact and well laid out, as well. I think there’s a big future for the chip it is based on, the Freescale Kinetis MK20DX256 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4, will be featured in a lot more hobbyist and hardware development projects which demand more speed and features over the Arduino line. For $20 it is certainly affordable.
Working with a variety of LED displays lately I need quite a bit of speed to update the matrices. My original tests used the Arduino Duemilanove or the Arduino Mega 2560, but those are limited to 16Mhz. The Teensy can run at up to 96Mhz! Big improvement. Additionally it has 64K of memory and 256K of flash.
One thing I’m looking forward to is experimenting with the 12-bit DAC on this chip, it has one digital to analog output and it looks like it works pretty good, so it can be a nifty waveform generator, do some audio output and a few other things. It also has touch sensor inputs but I don’t know if that’s something I’ll play with but you never know!
If you’ve done anything cool with a Teensy or plan on it, let me know in the comments, I think I have a lot of experimenting to see what these new capabilities bring over boards like the Arduino Duemilanove and the Arduino Mega 2560.
Oh, I forgot to mention they plan to have support for the CAN bus, I’d be really interested to see if I can interface with the CAN bus on my DJI Multirotor Flight Controller (Naza M V2)
I’ll post updates as I get some projects done, but it feels like some new life has been breathed into my experimenting. Although I’ll probably never use the full capabilities of this chip, and I may even use it for some stupidly simple projects, it’s still very cheap and that makes it a better option for many things.
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