Get your R&D skills on
With cutting edge boards, you aren't just learning the future. You're helping to build it.
These boards don't have complete software support, and what does exist is still in active development. The companies that make the chips have released them so developers can help them find and fix bugs.
The NXP iMX RT1011 microcontroller powers this board with a 500 MHz ARM Cortex M7 processor. There's 8 MB of execute-in-place QSPI for firmware + disk storage and 128KB of SRAM in-chip, plus a WiFi co-processor using an on-board ESP32 module.
The iMX series of chips is the fastest microcontrollers around, with a Cortex M7 processor that is more powerful than the M0 or M4, and clock speeds of 500MHz+. For pure performance, there's nothing better! This chip family is well known for being featured in the Teensy 4 dev board series. This is a Metro-shaped board so you can use many Arduino shields, that is fully open source so you can adapt the design to create your own custom layouts, and a USB drag-n-drop bootloader plus CircuitPython support for easy development.
Please note that this board does not have Arduino or Platform.io support. You can program it with CircuitPython, a fast-to-start embedded version of the popular Python programming language, or with MCU Xpresso IDE for C/C++ advanced embedded development. CircuitPython support does not have all features working with this board.
The ESP32 is an SOC made for wireless applications. It was designed by Espressif, the same company that makes the ESP8266, and has built-in radios to support WiFi, Bluetooth Classic, BLE, and NFC.
It's a new chip, and is essentially a public beta at this point. The firmware to support some of the low-level features is still being written, and bugs are still being found. Some parts may not work and others are unreliable.
The feature set is impressive, and it's worth working with the current hardware so you can be familiar with it when all the problems are fixed.
We don't recommend it for mission-critical projects, though.
Page last edited July 23, 2025
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