 Hi, I'm EPI. I'm EPI, brought to you by Digikey and Advertisement this week, and it's Renaissance. Renaissance. Renaissance. Renaissance is a maker of microcontrollers and boards, and this week we're going to be covering the RA series of microcontrollers. They were just featured on digikey.com. And even though we've never used Renaissance chips, these chips are all ARM Cortex. I think they're M33s, M4s, maybe a few M0s and M7s. So if you're using other chips that are in the ARM Cortex family, it should be fairly easy to retarget your designs, and they've got some good stuff. In particular, because they have to pick one product out of the entire group, the RA4M1 is what I'm looking at, and I'm looking at it because, as I'll show later, it's used in the new upcoming Arduino R4. So we'll go into the details of all this datasheet. There's just a jam-packed Cortex M4 chip. Renaissance for people in the West who may not have used it, because again, it's not a huge brand, it's not conglomerate, it's the merging of Hitachi Mitsubishi Electric and NEC. These are Japanese silicon vendors, and they kind of merged forces in a video that we actually showed before. It's really cool. You can check it out on their YouTube. It's got the samurai who cuts through complexity and deploys good silicon. The reason I understood in looking at this is, first off, it popped up on the digikey.com slash new products listing. Even though it's not super new, it was kind of a featured product, and I was like, oh yeah, that's the same family of chips that's in the new Arduino R4, and we signed up for the Early Access program, and we're getting these chips, so we'll make sure that it works with all of our libraries. And one of the things is that the R4 is really changing directions from the previous versions of the Arduino Uno, which were based on 8-bit microcontrollers, such as the AppMega8, 168, and 328, and those were 8-bit AVR chips with 32K of RAM at the most, maybe 32K of flash, 2K of RAM at the most. So why move to this chip, the 32-bit Cortex-M4 RA-4M1? And we'll look at it, but it's got a lot of good peripherals, and one of the big things is, of course, it is 5-volt compliant, as well as has native USB, so it's a really nice step up from an 8-bit microcontroller, and you're looking at this, it's got a lot of peripherals and capabilities that you would expect from both the best of the 8-bit world and the best of the Cortex world. So the biggest thing, of course, is that this chip is 5-volt compliant, and I don't mean like some STM chips, you can run them at 3.3 volts, and then you can kind of pipe 5 volts into one of the IO pins as long as it's powered. You really can drive this whole thing at 5.5 volts, which is at max 5 volts nominal, and that's quite unusual, because, again, pretty much every ARM Cortex chip we've seen has been 3 volts. There are a few chips, I think microchip makes the same C21, and that one is 5-volt compatible, but doesn't have native USB, so this kind of has the best of both worlds, it's got that 5-volt logic capability and high currents, it's got some high current pins as well, but ARM Cortex M4 power. The peripherals are really great on this chip, for example, the ADC converter, it's pretty common to have an AC converter, but this one does 14-bit conversion, that's nice, most top out at maybe 10 or 12, it's also got a DAC, a 12-bit DAC, so it's kind of nice, of course there's DMA, temperature sensor, sure, comparator, sure, but there's also like op-amps built in, there's four op-amps that you can configure, and I think you can set gains and do inversions and set up stuff so your small signal analogs can be then piped into the ADC. For serial communication, that's your new standard, peripherals, I2C, SPI, new art, there's two of each, which is cool, so there's also SSI-E, which I believe is just I2S, another thing that's really nice, it's got CAN, not all Cortex chips have CAN, plus natively, you'll need a transceiver, but the CAN module is built in, so that's kind of cool if you're interested in using this with CAN-Best Networks, because those are 5-volt logic networks, so you don't need like a transceiver with a separate boost converter, because again, you can power everything here off of 5 volts. Another couple interesting things that you don't normally see on Cortex chips is that it's got a segment LCD controller, so like LCDs that you see on calculators, you can run those directly, you don't need a separate chip, very handy if you're doing a product where you want LCD, even though a lot of times people use TFTs these days or OLEDs, there's still a lot of products that would use a segment LCD, and this makes sense, Renaissance makes a lot of chips that are used in white goods, and a lot of white goods have LCDs. Capacitive touch sensing unit, also very common in white goods, because you don't want to have buttons that can mechanically be damaged, capacitive touch will work through glass or plastic and can work with waterproof things that are in the home, kitchen, or bathroom. And of course it's got the native USB 2.0, full speed, so that's your 12 megabits per second, you can power directly from the USB port, and then there is a separate 3.3 volt LDO, but it's internal, it's just needed for the logic level, signaling, shifting for the D plus and D minus lines. There's a few versions, all of them are going to have 256K of flash, 32K of RAM, I forgot to know, but they also have a 2K of like separate flash, so it's basically like EEPROM, then the main flash memory size, you don't have to worry about, oh, you know, I want to store some non-volatile memory, but I don't, I want to make sure it's kept separate from the main code, they provide a separate code area, it does come in a couple different packages depending on how many GPIOs you want, up to 100 pins. Right now, you know, I saw them to Jackie and Stock, at least, they definitely had the 48 and 64 and 40 pin versions, QFN and the LQFP as well. Another thing that you sent me that was kind of neat was Gadget Unisos, which is a couple years old, it's not a new thing, but they made really cool, like, Sakura, pink-themed dev boards for all of their popular chipsets, and somewhat interesting, like one of them was, like, the Citrus board, where they're kind of middle left, is specifically for use in the Ruby language, so I don't know if it has like an embedded Ruby interpreter or it compiles from Ruby to microcode, there's like a kind of a Flora lily pad-esque ground board, the GR Mango uses one of their high-end chips, and it's, you know... You're an investor in Arduino, no? I hope this is a new Arduino lineup. Yeah, be cool. The Karumi is a little bit like a Tinti or Pro Micro, and then the Mango is Raspberry Pi-ish, and then the Leechy and the Peach are kind of Arduino-ish size. The IDE, they made some changes so it's pink. Yeah, it's pink, and it's Arduino compatible, you know, they forked it and tweaked it to make it work with their boards, could be that they actually can change purple things for their SDK, and another thing that's interesting is, it's a different chip than the Uno R4, by the way, so this is an older project, and it looks like it even had this chip has native Ethernet, which is why they stuck an RJ45 on there, as well as USB host. This is a quite an advanced board. They also have a web compilation system, which I thought was kind of neat, so I opened it up, and it's like, yeah, you can compile from within the web browser, and I guess you download the bin file, and you can drag it over like the bootloader, and it's got like this kind of sakura themed to it, and then the packaging also is from this artist. I couldn't find any photos of it online that I could use, but the packaging for these boards is also very beautiful, from a Japanese artist and has like these Japanese themes. So that's a separate project in this, but I thought it would be interesting, you know, if you were interested in the family of boards, you want to try their online compilation system, check it out with the sakura chipset. Can you go back one? It uses the RX 633N, and a lot of stuff doesn't really penetrate into the Western market, but it's always good to have competition, and you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who just came back from Tokyo, and she said, you know, when you're in Japan, everything is just a little bit nicer. It's like five to 10% better than it would be in the US, and so, you know, I think the documentation and usage, and I'd like that, you know, the board that could have gotten away with future, sorry, fewer peripherals on the RA4 series, but I think they're like, oh yeah, also LCD, also Canvas, also, you know, DMA, etc. So, oh goodness, sorry, go back one. So the, it's called, the full part name is the R7FA4M1, a series, there's a couple, so for example, this is the QFN, there's also the QFP, which is the highlight. There's also a dev board for that RA4M1 series if you do not want to wait for the Uno R4, I'm sure it'll come out soon, but if you're like, I just want something immediately tomorrow, they do have a dev kit for this chip, which comes with a Sega J-Link debugger with a separate USB, so you can like debug, like a full, you know, GDB debugging system, as well as the native USB, and as like a couple peripherals on there, like capacitive touch and potentiometer and push button, and also it's got current sensing areas, you can like remove the jumper. Available in Digikey. That's right. It's in stock. I'm so excited that we can do INFPI, and the parts are available. So check out Digikey, you know, they're doing more with Windows House, and I think, again, it's good, like even though I don't know many people who used these chips, it's always good to have more competition. I think, you know, we've had plenty of European and Western companies and American companies make chips based on the Cortex standard. Why not check out what's going on in Japan? So, how are you? Hi, on IPI? Hi, on IPI!