Teensy 4.0 Board Overview
Teensy 4 is a new Teensy series of board rolled out by PJRC.com. It has used one of the fasted MCUs available in the market i.e NXP’s iMX RT1062 MCU which runs at ~600Mhz.
It is a small little MCU board with header connectors compatible with breadboard so it is maker friendly. It also has two not so friendly connectors on the bottom side which gives access to some more IOs and interfaces.
It packs a lot of features which I will share below in some more detail along with pinouts, schematics.
Teensy 4.0 Features
Looking at Small size (1.4 Inches x 0.7 Inches) of the Teensy 4.0 board doesn’t feels like that it will offer lot of features but it actually has following features and interfaces (obviously, not all will be available at the same time):
- NXP IMXRT1062 ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz
- 1024K RAM ( tightly coupled 512K RAM)
- 2048K Flash (64K reserved for recovery & EEPROM emulation)
- 2x USB ports, 480 MBit/sec
- 3x CAN Bus (1 with CAN FD)
- 2x I2S Digital Audio
- 1x S/PDIF Digital Audio
- 1x SDIO (4 bit) native SD
- 3x SPI, all with 16 word FIFO
- 3x I2C, all with 4 byte FIFO
- 7x Serial, all with 4 byte FIFO
- 32x general purpose DMA channels
- 31x PWM pins
- 40x digital pins, all interrupt capable
- 14x analog pins, 2 ADCs on chip
- Cryptographic Acceleration
- Random Number Generator
- RTC for date and time function
- Programmable FlexIO
- Pixel Processing Pipeline
- Peripheral cross triggering
- Power On/Off management
Teensy 4.0 Pinout
If you need a more user friendly Pin-Out in a table form, you can download the xls file.
Teensy 4.0 Schematic
As with other Teensy board, schematic for Teensy 4.0 board is also openly available for your reference.
Teensy 4.0 3D Model
Download the 3d model from GrabCAD. Thanks to Simon Nylund
Teensy 4.0 Breakout Boards
As we see, Teensy 4.0 Board doesn’t not have any real word connector or interfaces just the pins on the boards or pads. If you are planning to use the board with the bread board then it is fine otherwise you will need another breakout board to have various interfaces extended appropriately to be used in any application.
Some of the breakout boards which are available are given below:
1. PRJC’s Teensy 4.0 Beta Breakout Board
Features:
- SD Card Connector
- USB Host Connector
- RTC Battery Coin cell connector
- Header for Audio Shield
- Headers for Serial Ports (7)
- Power ON/OFF Button, LED for 3.3V Power Indication
- CAN FD Port on three Pin terminal connector
- Few Ground Test points for making easy measurements
2. Teensy 4.0 Ultimate Breakout Board ($44)
A Full-Featured Teensy 4.0 Breakout Board with Uninterruptible Power Supply.
Features
- Solderless Teensy 4.0 holder
- Access to all 34 I/Os with power rails
- Standard Teensy footprint lets you prototype with your favorite Teensy shields
- Micro SD card slot (Native SDIO pins, doesn’t tie up any standard I/Os)
- USB Host connector for keyboards, mouse, etc.
- Barrel jack for external power sources up to 18V
- Program and ON/OFF buttons for easy development
- CR1225 battery for RTC backup
- Optional High efficiency battery charger / Uninterruptible Power Supply
- Optional boost circuit lets you use 5V devices from battery power
- Optional SPI flash memory (256Mb)
- Optional 18350 Li-ion battery holder for testing your projects on the go (requires battery charger option)
3. FRDM4236 Teensy 4.0 Breakout Board
It gives access to IOs and USB Host and OLED interface on the header. It also has SD Card connector inbuilt. You can see the schematic here.
4. Other three Breakout Boards on PRJC Forum
I hope you will find information about the available breakout boards for Teensy 4.0 helpful.
Getting started Guides
- Check out this: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html
Where to buy Teensy 4.0?
I am sure after looking at the spec, you cannot resist to get hold of one little beast before it gets out of stock :).
You can buy Teensy 4.0 board from various source as mentioned below based on your preference:
- PJRC.com
- OSHPark Purple Teensy Boards 🙂
- Mouser.com
- Adafruit.com
- SparkFun Electronics
- Robu.in
- FABtoLAB
- Amazon.com
- OpenCircuit
Teensy 4.0 Board Review
I think the board is really good and powerful given that it has 600MHz NXP’s iMX RT1062 MCU. It also gives access to various IOs over header and other pads on the bottom side. Coolest thing is one click recovery option 🙂
What I feel is it could have provided more IOs via proper headers like Dual line headers on both sides. Pads on bottom sides of the board makes it difficult for the developer to access and at the end it doesn’t gives a neat the solution.
Single click program feature is great but for the developers who are trying to build their products using this board might not be that useful.
Moreover what I think is, It would have the following ( my wish list 🙂 ):
- Proper breakout for IOs : Either dual line header on both sides or with a little bigger size board I would have given castellated pads all around the board. I am more inclined towards castellated pads.
- More IOs: Given the MCU used is having 196 pin BGA, I think many more IOs could be brought out. I know the size of the board will need to be increased but I would have preferred that. With high performance MCU giving limited number of IOs seems not so reasonable to me.
- SD Card: I would add SD Card on the same side as Micro USB so it is perfectly positioned for an enclosure cut out.
- LEDs: One power LED and a USER LED along the same side as Micro USB would be preferred.
- Ethernet: It would have been a good choice to provide an Ethernet interface on the IOs, in the current version Ethernet signals are not coming out.
- Lower Price: For the Teensy 4 type board, I was expecting a price range of 12-15$ not more than that but as it is targeted mainly for makers and electronics enthusiast community, current price of $19.95 is fine. May be they will have a special pricing for bulk purchase.
- FreeRTOS Support: Not sure if Teensy 4 supports FreeRTOS but it would have been great to have FreeRTOS support by default (documentation about how to set it up) as an option like it support Arduino Library.
One more thing which I think is needed is a readily available breakout board. I would have preferred a breakout board with USB Host, Ethernet, SD Card, some multi-function sensor chips, IOs on headers and few LEDs would have been much better to experiment with.
I have already ordered one of my Teensy 4 board and I will add more thought once I get my hands dirty with the board.
Other Embedded Hardware Reviews
If you are interested to read about other embedded hardware I have reviewed (Raspberry Pi SBC, Raspberry Pi Compute Module, BalenaFin board, Onion Omega2S, Stereo Pi, Crowd Supply, etc.), check them out here. Hope you will like them and learn something new.