PX-HER0 ARM Cortex-M0 Development Board and Ecosystem is for Beginners and Veterans (Crowdfunding)

PX-HER0 ARM Cortex Development Board and Ecosystem

Piconomix is offering an embedded Arm Cortex-M0 development board that is aimed at the education, beginner maker, and enthusiast crowd. The PX-HER0 is a development board with an ecosystem of sourcing materials for learning the entire ARM structure through an open-source C library and full documentation.

The Basics of the Board

The PX-HER0 is a low-power board, running an STM32 MCU with an Arm Cortex-M0 core. There is an LCD Display, that is viewable even in direct sunlight, and the entire package is lightweight and very functional.

Mass Storage

To activate the bootloader, a double-tap of the RESET button, and the mass storage drive HERO-BOOT appears in the host computer. Drag and Drop are active and the UF2 file can be dragged right to the drive.

The Ecosystem

The ecosystem for the PX-HER0 is backed by an extensive C Library and documentation on GitHub Piconomix repo. There is an Arduino tutorial for the HER0 board explaining how to use it with the Arduino Core STM32 library.

The documentation found on FwLib page at Piconomix.com includes:

- Getting Started Guide
- Bootloader Page
- Board Specific Examples
- STM32CubeIDE Getting Started Guide
- Arduino Support
- ARM and STM32 Getting Started Guide
- Tutorials STM32
- CLI Explorer App

Specifications

MCU – STMicro STM32L072RB ultra-low-power ARM Cortex-M0+ with 128k FLASH, 20k SRAM, 6k EEPROM
External Storage – Adesto AT25SF041 4 Mbit serial flash memory, spring-loaded push-push MicroSD card slot
Serial communication: Rock-solid FTDI FT230XS USB-serial bridge
Low-power 128 x 64 monochrome graphic LCD with LED backlight
User LED and battery charger LED
Piezo buzzer, 6 user buttons, Reset button
Peripheral connectors:
- PWR (3.6 V – 5 V )
- 4x – ADC
- 1x – DAC
- 8x – GPIO / 4x- PWM
- 2x – UART
- 3x – I²C (single I²C bus)
- Sparkfun Qwiic / STEMMA QT I²C connector
- Seeed Grove I²C
- SPI
Power:
- Li-Po battery charger
- A zero-burden voltage monitoring circuit
- TI LM3670 step-down DC-DC regulator
Dimensions:
- Board – 100 x 80 mm (3.94 x 3.15″)
- Display active pixel area – 48.6 x 24.9 mm (1.91 x 0.98″) / 54.6 mm (2.15″) diagonal

The system can be applied to areas such as

Practical embedded engineering course for students and professionals
Low-power foundation for IoT sensors
Long-term data logger
Environmental monitoring for citizen scientists
Control panel
Test fixture

The Campaign and Pricing

The Crowd Supply campaign is running and pricing is up as well as some delivery timeline information. Single Board $42.00 – Single Board with ST-LINK-V3MINI – debugger – $56.00

Shipping July 23, 2020 – Funding ends April 2020

Stephen Vicinanza

Stephen started writing about technology after publishing sci-fi short stories. His first White-Paper, written in 2008, was well received and inspired him to continue writing about technology. Today he writes in the technology space full time, covering a multitude of topics. During the time he wrote part-time he edited hundreds of titles for large publishers, in science and technology. He lives in Staten Island, with his wife and children.