Seeed's Compact XIAO Range Gets Its Tenth Model, in the Renesas-Powered XIAO RA4M1
The growing family of small boards now has a version powered by the same chip as the Arduino UNO R4 — and eight extra GPIO pins.
Seeed Studio has announced a new entry in its ultra-compact XIAO range of microcontroller development boards, the XIAO RA4M1 — powered, as the name suggests, by Renesas' RA4M1 Arm Cortex-M4 processor.
"Since the release of the Arduino UNO R4 in March 2023, we've received many requests to incorporate the powerful Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller (MCU) into the popular Seeed Studio XIAO form factor," says Seeed Studio's Lily Li of the demand for the company's latest board. "We're excited to announce that it’s finally here with the new Seeed Studio XIAO RA4M1!"
The comparison to the Arduino UNO R4 is only natural: the company released the UNO R4 WiFi and Minima boards last year as the biggest refresh to its best-selling microcontroller development board family ever, finally breaking away from eight-bit AVR microcontrollers by moving to the Renesas RA4M1 with its 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 core running at up to 48MHz with hardware floating-point unit (FPU).
The Seeed XIAO RA4M1 uses the exact same chip, complete with 32kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 256kB of flash memory, but in a considerably smaller form-factor. 11 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are brought out to castellated breadboard-friendly headers at either side of the compact board, as with other models in the XIAO range — but a further eight are available on test pads at the rear, suitable for soldered-lead or pogo-pin use, expanding the available GPIO pins to 19.
Features of the board include USB Type-C for data and power, a user-accessible USB 2.0 channel, 14-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), 12-bit digital to analog converter (DAC), CAN bus, and an on-board RGB LED. There are four operating modes, Seeed explains, with the deepest sleep mode drawing just 45μA — and pads on the back support an optional lithium battery with charge management.
The XIAO RA4M1 is available to pre-order now on the Seeed Studio store at $4.99 before volume discounts, ahead of shipping later this month; the company has also announced an early adopter program, which provides authors and maintainers of "popular open source Arduino projects" with two free boards and access to technical support to ease the process of porting to the new chip.