We see a lot of breakout boards for various micro-controllers here on Tindie but this one really takes the cake with the amount of features it has.
At the heart of this board is a Dragonfly STM32L476RE which can run at up to 80MHz, has 512kB of high-speed flash and 128kB SRAM. Even though the board already has a boat load of memory, the designer Pesky Products has included 16MB of external flash memory which communicates via QSPI. A neat little feature of the QSPI protocol is the external flash can be mapped as system memory in the Dragonfly chip adding up to 16MB of additional memory for the MCU.
The huge amount of added memory makes this board ideal for high-speed data logging which brings us to the next super cool feature of this board. You can plug it into your computer and it appears as a removable disk meaning you can drag and drop any log files you want! Very cool.
Another aspect of this board is the focus on power economy. Firstly the Dragonfly chip itself has several low power modes, the lowest being shutdown mode where it only draws 33nA and can be woken up by the on-board RTC (Real Time Clock). There is also an on-board voltage regulator. These can sometimes draw several milli-amps in quiescent current but the one on this board is the NCP8170 which has a quiescent current of only 500nA! Crazy!
Dragonfly Breakout PCB with add-on boards
We haven’t even reached the end of the feature list yet. Pesky Products have designed an add-on board which contains a MPU9250 9DOF motion sensor AND a BME280 pressure, humidity, and temperature sensor. Meaning you can solder on this little add-on and have an ultra low power environmental data logger ready to go. Did we mention that this board is Arduino compatible? You can download some example sketches here.
