Is Particle Boron compatible with Adafruit Feather M0

Getting Started
1

I have an Adafruit Feather M0 Basic Proto - ATSAMD21 Cortex M0 that I would like to use to send data to my Boron for transmission. I read that the ESP8266 Feather is not compatible with the Boron, and wanted to check whether or not the one I have is before I connect it.

2

Not sure why that would be. Can you provide link to where you read that?

As long as you are using standard 3.3V I/O, any processor can connect to a Boron. You can use serial, I2C with one device as a slave and the other as a master, or SPI (again with master/slave). What are you trying to send to the Boron?

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https://docs.particle.io/community/feather/
Just above the section about displays.

I am trying to send accelerometer, battery, GPS, and a couple of other things.

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@crecine, the reason is that any other featherboard with an MCU (eg. ESP8266, M0, etc) will attempt to power the 3V3 rail on the doubler/trippler board since they have their own regulators onboard. This will clash with the power being provided by the Boron. You would need to power the esp8266 or M0 independently or from the Boron's 3V3 supply and that would require modifications to the doubler/trippler board.

Why can't you connect these to the Boron directly?

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I had connected and programmed them on the Feather before I got the Boron, since I didn’t originally realize the Boron was more than just a GSM module. The accelerometer is direct soldered to the Feather since I was planning on using it in a stack without a separate proto-shield. Could I just use the “En” pin shown in the pin-out below to disable the 3.3v on the feather and then power it with the battery?
Or would it be better to try to figure out how to attach everything directly to the Boron?

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@crecine, I would suggest that you consider just using the Boron. It is a very powerful platform and can allow you to expand using low cost mesh endpoints (Xenon).

In regards to the EN pin, it will disable power to the nRF52840 MCU which is needed to use the Boron’s Ublox modem so that won’t work.

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Thanks for the help and advice, I have decided to use just the Boron. It took a bit of work to get everything transferred over, but it seems to be working.

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