Savage Electronics' MKL26 Feather and MK26F Feather Bring NXP's Crossover MCUs to Your Breadboard

Savage Electronics has announced a pair of new Feather form factor development boards built around NXP's KL26 and K26F "crossover" microcontrollers.

All Adafruit Feather use microcontrollers mostly from Atmel and it is difficult to find them from other manufacturers," Savage Electronics' Josue Alejandro explains. "There are few using the newest NXP Crossover MCUs, which is why I decide to add these new Feathers, one with low [power] consumption and one mid-range.

"Having an Adafruit Feather format gives us the possibility and all the inherent compatibility of these boards, making them easier to integrate into the projects we have but for which we want to change the microcontroller since we do not always require having an Atmel or to program them with Arduino. These boards I will use without a doubt in some projects, since they offer many capabilities in small footprints."

The Feather MKL26 is, as the name suggests, built around NXP's KL26 low-power microcontroller with Arm Cortex-M0+ core running at 48MHz. The board includes 32kB of RAM and 256kB of flash memory, while Alejandro has added an RGB LED and a microSD slot to the breadboard-friendly Feather layout. For power, the board includes a 3.3V regulator with USB or a lithium-polymer battery charging circuit as inputs.

The Feather MK26F is designed for those who need more performance, swapping out the low-power KL26 for the K26F and offering a 180MHz Arm Cortex-M4F processor alongside 256kB of RAM and 2MB of flash memory. The same RGB LED, battery circuit, USB port, and microSD slot are present and correct — but the latter is connected via SDHC rather than SPI, to improve throughput.

More on the boards themselves can be found on the Savage Electronics website, while the company's Tindie store has both available to order priced at $20 for the MKL26 Feather and $32 for the MK26F Feather.