Adafruit's Arduino Uno-Layout Metro M7 Board Is "Getting Very Close to Shipping," It Says
Unveiled nearly three years ago, the high-performance i.MX RT1011 with "AirLift" coprocessor board is finally ready to fly.
Adafruit has announced that its Arduino Uno-layout Metro M7 development board, based on the NXP i.MX RT1011 "crossover microcontroller unit," is finally heading to production — nearly three years after it was first teased.
Adafruit's Metro M7 has been a long time coming. The company first unveiled the design back in 2020 shortly after announcing the similarly Arduino Uno-layout Metro ESP32-S2, based around Espressif's Wi-Fi-capable module of the same name. While the Metro ESP32-S2 launched, and is currently available to purchase at $19.95 before volume discounts, the Metro M7 has taken a little longer to reach production.
The Adafruit Metro M7 is built around NXP's i.MX RT1011, part of the company's "crossover microcontroller unit" range designed to offer the performance of an application-class processor in a microcontroller design. With a single Arm Cortex-M7 core running at 500MHz and 128kB of static RAM (SRAM), it's a powerful chip — to which Adafruit has paired an Espressif ESP32-WROOM-32 module as a Wi-Fi coprocessor, a concept it has dubbed "AirLift."
Elsewhere on the board is 4MB of quad-SPI (QSPI) flash memory with execute-in-place (XIP) support, a USB Type-C port for data and power with a barrel jack for 6-12V DC power, a physical reset button plus boot-mode switches, a Serial Wire Debug (SWD) connector, power switch, and a STEMMA QT connector for external I2C hardware.
The pin headers, meanwhile, use a spacing which will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used an Arduino Uno in the past — and should offer at least partial compatibility with Arduino Uno shield accessories.
While the company hasn't yet confirmed a launch date and pricing, Adafruit's Phillip Torrone has said that the device is "getting very close to shipping" — with interested parties invited to sign up for a notification when the board, finally, goes on sale.