Arduino M0 vs. M0 pro

Other Hardware 3rd Party Boards
1

I need a 32 bit board with an UNO footprint. The Arduino M0 seems like it would work well for my project:

How similar is this to the M0 pro? I can't find any evidence that this board even exists, outside of this Amazon listing. Every review, product listing, etc. refers to the M0 pro. Does anyone know how difficult it will be to get an IDE to interface with this thing? Will I run into many problems in switching my project over from an UNO to an M0?

Thanks in advance!

2

You probably already know this is an arduino.org board. If you have access to an arduino.cc board I would recommend to get one of those, to support the people who maintain this web site and this core. In Europe I have no access to these boards so I bought an M0 (yes the plain one, not the pro).

That said, the M0 is a nice board. I always found the Leonardo made more sense than an Uno because of its native usb, and the M0 is a great successor: same price category but with an arm processor.

Most M0 Pro users burn the .cc bootloader into it. After this operation you almost have the same thing as a Zero. Since the M0 Pro has an on board programmer, you can easilly burn the bootoader with the .cc ide.

An M0 does not have this programmer. So you have two options:

  • Use the .cc ide (1.6.x) with the original .org bootloader. This works reliably, though not fully automatic: I compile from the ide and upload the sketch with a cmd line script. I will write up how to do that. Edit: see here.
  • Use an external swd capable programmer to burn the bootloader.
    If you incidently have a raspberry pi or a beagle bone, you can use that too. I used a beagle bone to do the job. Edit: see here.