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Adafruit Feather RP2040 with USB Type A Host

by Adafruit

You're probably really used to microcontroller boards with USB, but what about a dev board with two?

Two is more than one, so that makes it twice as good! And the Adafruit Feather RP2040 with USB Host is definitely double-the-fun of Adafruit's other Feather RP2040 boards, with a USB Type A port on the end for connecting USB devices to.

Now you might be thinking "hey waitaminute, the RP2040 doesn't have two USB port peripherals???" and you'd be correct! But what it does have is a nifty PIO peripheral that can be (ab)used to emulate a USB host peripheral. You get to keep the main USB port for uploading, debugging, and data communication, while at the same time sending and receiving data to just-about-any USB device. This work is originally by sekigon on GitHub, and if you're using Pico SDK that's still the recommended library to use.

Currently, support for the USB Host peripheral is only in Arduino. So check out the TinyUSB 'dual role' examples for some things you can do! For example, datalogging to a USB Key. Or reading from another device/microcontroller that has USB CDC serial interface. Or creating an HID re-mapper. Or connecting to weird devices that require firmware-updates like the Cypress EZ-USB based Intellikeys communications board.

Note that this is definitely a firmware hack: you will need to dedicate the second ARM core and both PIO peripherals to just handling the USB messages, but Adafruit find that it does work fairly well, or at least as well as most microcontroller's USB Host peripherals!

Adafruit also include a 1 Amp boost converter based on the TPS61023 so you can run from Lipo battery and get a nice clean 5V output for the USB devices. The booster has the enable pin tied to one of the extra GPIO on the RP2040 so power can be manually turned on and off to hard-reset whatever is connected.

At the Feather's heart is an RP2040 chip, clocked at 133 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. This chip has a whopping 8MB of onboard QSPI FLASH and 264K of RAM!  There's even room left over for a STEMMA QT connector for plug-and-play of I2C devices!

To make it easy to use for portable projects, Adafruit added a connector for any of our 3.7V Lithium polymer batteries and built-in battery charging. You don't need a battery, it will run just fine straight from the USB Type C connector. But, if you do have a battery, you can take it on the go, then plug in the USB to recharge. The Feather will automatically switch over to USB power when it's available.

Here're some handy specs! You get:

  • Measures 2.0" x 0.9" x 0.28" (50.8mm x 22.8mm x 7mm) without headers soldered in
  • Light as a (large?) feather - 6.3 grams
  • RP2040 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core running at ~133 MHz @ 3.3V logic and power
  • 264 KB RAM
  • 8 MB SPI FLASH chip for storing files and CircuitPython/MicroPython code storage. No EEPROM
  • Tons of GPIO! 21 x GPIO pins with following capabilities:
    • Four 12-bit ADCs (one more than Pico)
    • Two I2C, Two SPI, and two UART peripherals, we label one for the 'main' interface in standard Feather locations
    • 16 x PWM outputs - for servos, LEDs, etc
  • Built-in 200mA+ lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
  • Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
  • RGB NeoPixel for full-color indication.
  • On-board STEMMA QT connector that lets you quickly connect any Qwiic, STEMMA QT or Grove I2C devices with no soldering!
  • Both Reset button and Bootloader select button for quick restarts (no unplugging-replugging to relaunch code)
  • USB Type C connector lets you access built-in ROM USB bootloader and serial port debugging
  • USB Type A connector for USB host capability. D+ on GPIO 16, D- on GPIO 17
  • 5V Boost converter, up to 1 Amp peak output for USB peripheral power, with 500mA resettable fuse. Enable on GPIO 18. 
  • 3.3V Power/enable pin
  • 4 mounting holes
  • 12 MHz crystal for perfect timing.
  • 3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output

12 customer reviews

15 days ago
Simply the best and most powerful MCU on the hobbiest market at the moment. Even the arduino setup works out of the box. So far I've tested I2C, SPI, Audio, USB audio, Rotary Encoder and SDIO card libs - all work flawlessly and fantastically well. Running some audio spectrum processing the Arm CMSIS libs for a 4096 FFT takes around 412us (0.4ms) including mag squared calcultions and all the various buffer copies - amazing stuff!
by Anonymous about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
As someone dealing with microcontrollers for the first time the teensy is excellent. Incredible performance for the size and while it doesn't have a massive community the examples that are part of the ide are really detailed.
by Harry about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Got one as soon as they were back in stock. Arrived quickly and well packaged. Couldn’t be happier with this amazing board/service!
by Andrew about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
3 years ago
Nice little board with quite a bit of juice and a lot of connection options. Really nice that you can use it as a USB host, and that it has pinouts for ethernet too. Haven't tested all the stuff it can do, as I mainly use mine to run a DirtyWave M8 tracker/synth.
by Peder about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Fast delivery & well packaged. Using the Teensy 4.1 to run the "headless" version of the M8 tracking software - works great and setup was way easier than I expected.
by David about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
I have soldered on the pins, and its running on my breadboard. I probably have not yet accessed 1 per cent of what this fantastic little board can do... I'm using Visual Studio Code with PlatformIO, all seems good so far....
by Martyn about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Absolutely wonderful card. Incredibly fast and stable. Lots of RAM and lots of flash memory. It is also possible to expand both RAM and flash by soldering circuits on the underside of the card. With good code examples and a content-rich forum. Works well to write code in both Arduino and Visual Studio. I really love this circuit
by Johan about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
This is a high end microcontroller. The USB host interface works very well with some good examples in the library. You can solder two PSram chips on the bottom for a Whopping 16GB of ram!!
by Robert about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io
5 years ago
So far the board works and powers on. I'm yet to use other features on it but Very excited. Order was quick and will use this website more often
by DARREN about Teensy 4.1 Development Board via REVIEWS.io

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