Provide a bleeding-edge high performance ultra low power MCU Feather board?

Hardware
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Hi,

Thanks for making amazing products.

One feedback point: I am hitting several cases where the limitation is not so much the connectivity itself, but the MCU and feather board. Your modules are amazing for providing a range of connectivity possibilities, and this is a space with a lot of development and competition (just see your products, GroundControl products, and several other providers such as the native iridium services).

But where the pain is to me today, is to find easy to use, turn key bleeding-edge development boards in feather or larger format, that provide the most recent and powerful ultra low power MCUs. For example, something like the best Ambiq MCU (this would be Ambiq Apollo 510 or the strongest Ambiq Apollo 4) or the best STM32U5 gives a lot more resources than most MCU feather boards I know of, at a fraction of the power consumption cost. These chips by being powerful and ultra low power open for a lot of IoT uses where it is possible to transmit small amounts of data back, but only if a lot of processing happens in the IoT device. I am speaking of experience, as several projects I use where we use Blues modems are made possible only by using the Ambiq 3 from Sparkfun artemis lines of products, although these are MCUs from 2019 that are way behind the Ambiq 510. So providing more modern MCUs in an easy to use way would open far more applications to IoT devices.

Hence, my question / feeling: would you be willing to / would it be possible for you to provide some Feather (or large format with more pins, and / or feather with double rows of pins to provide more pins - it is a bit sad to see MCUs with 10s of pads and many interfaces mounted on boards with only a few pins) like boards, but with some of the strongest MCUs available today - ideally Ambiq 510, or otherwise the strongest STM32U5?

From my point of view, having this kind of compute and ultra low power would open whole new applications for IoT connected edge devices and would be a game changer :slight_smile: .

2 Likes
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Hi @JZkr welcome to the forum!

We currently don’t have any plans for a more powerful MCU board, but your feedback has been noted! What we normally suggest is that you may want to consider using a Notecarrier-A to connect to your own custom MCU board. Although it doesn’t have the nice form factor as the Notecarrier-F for connecting Feather boards, it does make it easier to expose the Notecard’s pins to a generic MCU development board, such as the Ambiq Apollo 510 dev kit.

All of our Notecards are designed to be flexible with your hardware; you can deploy note-c or note-arduino on your own MCU of choice, and it will work just fine! When you’re ready to scale up from prototype, we also have documentation on designing custom carrier boards to even further suit your use case.

Thanks,

Alex

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Thank you for your detailed reply! :slight_smile:

Yes, I am aware of this. The issue I have is that I cannot find for example an affordable Ambiq 510 dev board - the MCU costs around 15USD but the official Ambiq dev board costs 250+USD. The situation is a bit better with the STM32U5 though, the nucleo dev boards are better priced - but still a much larger and overkill board.

I guess what I am saying is that it feels like there is a hole in dev boards with these powerful ultra low power MCUs, and this is a bit of a roadblock for some IoT applications where a lot of processing has to happen power-efficiently on the IoT note - so in a sense, this indirectly limits how much I can use your modems too :slight_smile: .

1 Like