EDIT: this sale has ended

Limit 50 per person. Sale runs Nov 25 to Dec 2. We have a limited supply available at this price.

With great sadness, we’re discontinuing Teensy 3.2.

Teensy 4.0 and 4.1 will continue.  We’re able to get the new 600 MHz chips in sufficient quantity.

But the sad reality is we simply can’t get enough of the old 72 MHz chips.  The ongoing problems with old chip supply has become a huge distraction which is impeding progress on Teensy 4.x development.

Teensy LC, 3.5, 3.6 were discontinued earlier this year.  When the small stock we have remaining for Teensy 3.2 runs out, it too will be gone.

Teensyduino 1.54 was released earlier last week.

MicroMod Teensy Support

Sparkfun recently released MicroMod Teensy, which is a product of collaboration between PJRC and Sparkfun.

MicroMod Teensy has hardware similar to Teensy 4.0 (600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7, 1MB RAM), but with larger 16MB flash memory.

Teensyduino 1.54 brings full support for MicroMod Teensy.  Simply select it from Arduino’s Tools > Boards menu.

Teensy has traditionally focused on DIY electronics experimentation & building, particularly with solderless breadboards.  While a few shields exist, like the Audio board, PJRC doesn’t have the resources to create a large ecosystem of shields & accessories.  Almost all projects involve DIY building.

Sparkfun’s MicroMod form factor aims to give you an ecosystem of “just plug parts together” carrier boards and Qwiic I2C modules for a wide variety of projects.  If any of Sparkfun’s growing collection of carrier boards is a close fit to your project’s needs, and you’d rather buy something than experience the joy and learning (but also frustration) of DIY building, MicroMod carrier boards may save you a lot of time.

MicroMod can also be useful for low volume production.  Obviously at high volume you would create a fully custom design from the ground up, and at medium volume a custom PCB using the Teensy 4 bootloader chip can make good sense.  But for low volume production, keeping up-front costs low and minimizing money tied up in inventory is often the best path to success.  In those cases, you would manufacture a simple 2-layer PCB with as few expensive parts as possible, then populate it with Teensy and other complex modules at the time you actually sell.

Traditional Teensy requires through-hole header pins, which are simple but labor intensive to solder.  MicroMod form factor allows you to build your PCB using an inexpensive M.2 socket.  Then when you’re ready to sell a product, just buy the MicroMod board and plug it in.

Like all Teensy models, MicroMod Teensy is supported by Teensy Loader.

Teensy Loader is a stand alone program which can be used without the rest of Teensyduino and the Arduino IDE.  When you need to program a large number of boards with the same firmware, load the HEX file and turn on Teensy Loader’s “Auto” mode.  Then plug each board into a USB cable and press its Program / Boot button, or momentarily touch pads together if your custom PCB is made without a pushbutton.  Auto mode immediately uploads your firmware without requiring any keystrokes or mouse clicks!

 

Arduino 1.8.15 Support

Arduino released Arduino IDE 1.8.15 on May 15, 2021, and also version 1.8.14 several days earlier.

Teensyduino 1.54 brings full support for these 2 latest (non-beta) versions of the Arduino software.

If you are unsure which version you have, click Help > About to check.  On Macintosh, the About menu item is found under the program name rather than Help.

 

SD Cards Using SdFat with SD Library Compatibility

Until now, 2 different libraries were used to access SD cards.  The old Arduino SD library is used by most programs.  Bill Greiman’s SdFat library offers higher performance, support for large cards, and use of long filename rather than limited to 8.3 DOS filename format.

Teensyduino 1.54 has completely removed the very old Arduino SD library, which internally included an ancient version of SdFat.

SD.h has been replaced by a thin compatibility layer to allow all programs written to use the old SD library to still compile and function properly, but all SD card access is now actually performed with the SdFat library.

You can even mix usage of the traditional SD library and SdFat’s more capable API in the same program.  To do this, use “SD.sdfs” to access the SdFat instance within the SD compatibility layer.

One of the most useful ways to mix APIs is calling SdFat’s begin(), with SD.sdfs.begin() rather than the simple SD.begin() which offers only a choice of which pin to use for CS.  SdFat’s begin() lets you configure several hardware access optimizations.

After using any of these, the SD card can be accessed using either SD library functions, or SdFat functions, or a mix of both.  For more detail, open File > Examples > SD > SdFat_Usage.

 

LittleFS for Files on Flash Chips

A LittleFS library is now included, providing littlefs published by ARM with a set of drivers for common memory chips and a high-level API compatible with the Arduino SD library.

Before 1.54, only the SerialFlash library was used for flash memory chips on Teensy.  SerialFlash provides essentially raw access to the underlying flash memory, which gives best performance, but comes with many limitations.  In particular, files must be created with a fixed size and can not grow in size beyond their original allocation.

LittleFS provides a traditional filesystem.  Files may be written as you would with the Arduino SD library.  LittleFS has flash memory wear leveling and copy-on-write behavior to protect against filesystem corruption if power is lost while writing, so LittleFS is a good choice for data logging or other applications which regularly write.  However, the copy-on-write behavior does impose overhead, making LittleFS slower than SerialFlash.

LittleFS supports flash memory chips on both the QSPI memory area of Teensy 4.1 and connected to the SPI ports.  FRAM memory chips are only supported on SPI ports.  Teensy’s built in memory can also be used.

These are the supported memory types with LittleFS in Teensyduino 1.54.

• Winbond W25Q16JV*IQ / W25Q16FV
• Winbond W25Q32JV*IQ / W25Q32FV
• Winbond W25Q64JV*IQ / W25Q64FV
• Winbond W25Q128JV*IQ / W25Q128FV
• Winbond W25Q256JV*IQ
• Winbond W25Q512JV*IQ
• Winbond W25Q64JV*IM (DTR)
• Winbond W25Q128JV*IM (DTR)
• Winbond W25Q256JV*IM (DTR)
• Winbond W25Q512JV*IM (DTR)
• Adesto/Atmel AT25SF041
• Spansion S25FL208K
• Winbond W25N01G
• Winbond W25N02G
• Winbond W25M02
• Cypress CY15B108QN-40SXI
• Cypress FM25V10-G
• Cypress FM25V10-G rev1
• Cypress CY15B104Q-SXI
• ROHM MR45V100A
• Teensy 4.0, 4.1, MicroMod Program Flash
• RAM Disk, internal RAM or PSRAM on Teensy 4.1

Use of program memory comes with some caveats.  While writing, your program may briefly stall when the flash memory is busy with an erase or write operation.  Uploading new programs fully erases the flash memory, destroying any saved files.  Future Teensyduino may provide a way to preserve the files across code uploading, but in 1.54 all files are lost.  Of course, this applies only to program flash.  Uploading code doesn’t alter data stored in other flash memory connected to the SPI ports or QSPI memory expansion.

To get started using LittleFS, check out the examples in File > Examples > LittleFS.  Documentation and more example code can be found in the LittleFS README file.

 

Audio Bandwidth Limited Waveforms

Audio waveform synthesis now supports bandwidth limited sawtooth, square, triangle and pulse waveforms, thanks to a contribution from Mark T.

These are the waveform types now supported by the waveform synthesis object.

Bandwidth limited waveforms are useful when another waveform rapidly modulates frequency, phase or amplitude.  Modulation creates additional spectral content.  With standard full bandwidth waveforms, this new sound content can suffer from Nyquist aliasing.  Using bandwidth limited waveforms can avoid those aliasing problems.

Some people also feel the bandwidth limited waveforms simply sound better, or “more musical”.

Now you can have either standard or bandwidth limited waveforms, simply by changing the waveform name.  However, the bandwidth limited versions do require more CPU time.  Teensy 4.0, 4.1 or MicroMod are best for polyphonic synthesis where many bandwidth limited waveforms may need to be synthesized simultaneously.

 

Audio Ladder Filter

The audio library now includes a low-pass ladder filter, thanks to a contribution by Richard van Hoesel, based on the Oscillator and Filter Algorithms for Virtual Analog Synthesis paper published by Vesa Välimäki and Antti Huovilainen in Computer Music Journal 2006.30.2.19.

This ladder filter attempts to provide classic Moog sound when used with subtractive synthesis, where complex waveforms are generated with rich sound spectrum and then filtered, often using other waveforms to dynamically alter the filter’s parameters.

The ladder filter has 3 inputs, for the signal to filter, a control signal which can modulate the filter’s corner frequency, and another control signal which can modulate the filter’s resonance.

Like the original analog Moog filter, resonance can be adjusted or modulated all the way to cause self oscillation.  Many classic synthesizer sounds make use of this self oscillation feature.

Internally, this ladder filter uses hyperbolic tangent approximation and 4X oversampling to simulate the non-linear behavior of the original analog Moog filters.  An inputDrive() function is available to adjust the response from a very “clean” sound to the “dirty” overdrive mode popular with the Minimoog Model D synthesizer.

To quickly hear the ladder filter, open File > Examples > Audio > Synthesis > LadderFilter.

The ladder filter is numerically intensive.  While it technically can run on Teensy 3.5 & 3.6, for practical usage Teensy 4.0 should be considered the minimum required hardware.

 

RGBW LEDs

Both WS2812Serial and OctoWS2811 now fully support WS2812,  WS2812B, SK6812 or “NeoPixel” RGBW addressable LEDs.  The additional white LED allows creation of pastel-like colors, and reliable white at greatly reduced power consumption.

These libraries use Direct Memory Access (DMA) to avoid blocking your program from running while the LED data is transmitted at 800 kbit/sec.  The non-blocking behavior gives your program more time to compute complex animations between LED updates.  It also prevents interference with audio, serial communication, or other libraries requiring interrupts.

On Teensy 4.0, 4.1, and MicroMod, OctoWS2811 can use any combination of digital pins, even while using RGBW LEDs, rather than only a fixed set of 8 pins as with older Teensy models.  For details, open File > Examples > OctoWS2811 > Teensy4_PinList.  Both libraries now include examples for RGBW.  If switching from RGB to RGBW, be sure to copy or update the buffer memory definition, as 4 bytes are needed for each LED rather than only 3.

 

FlexIO_t4 Library

FlexIO provides a sort of construction kit for building custom communication peripherals, using 32 bit shift registers, 8 & 16 bit timers, special control logic, and configurable signal routing to I/O pins.

Each FlexIO port provides 8 shift registers and 8 timers.  The IMXRT1062 chip on Teensy 4.0 has 3 of these FlexIO ports.

Teensyduino 1.54 now includes the FlexIO_t4 library written by Kurt E.

First, this library provides objects for FlexSerial and FlexIOSPI classes, so you can create even more SPI and Serial ports, beyond the regular 8 serial ports and 3 SPI ports!

Second, the library provides dynamic resource management for the shifter & timer resources within each FlexIO port.  The goal is for libraries using FlexIO, such as TMM-HM01B0-Camera and TriantaduoWS2811, and FlexSerial & FlexIOSPI, to coordinate their usage of the shifter & timer resources.  While this resource coordination is still a work-in-progress, ideally in future versions you use any combination of these and other FlexIO libraries, they will automatically resolve which library instances utilize each shifter & timer within FlexIO ports.

 

Additional Serial Buffer Memory

Each hardware serial object, Serial1 to Serial8, has buffers for storing data recently received or ready to transmit.  For certain applications, you might like to increase the size of these buffers.

For example, if your loop() function performs tasks which need to happen regularly for proper functioning of your project, but also needs to occasionally transmit a large message on a serial port, the fixed buffer size can become an issue.

When this simple program is run, indeed the messages appear on the serial TX1 pin (yellow trace below) every 100ms.  But at the beginning of each message, pin 4 (the green trace below) stops changing for several milliseconds because Serial1.write() must wait for space in the transmit buffer.

The usual but complex solution to this problem is Serail1.availableForWrite(), which tells you how many bytes can be written without incurring extra delay.  However, this requires restructuring your program to write the outgoing message in multiple pieces.  If the message contains data which may change over time, perhaps you make a copy of all the data.  Doable, but complicated.  Everything would be so much simpler if you could increase the Serial1 buffer size.

Now you can increase the serial buffer sizes on all 32 bit Teensy boards, thanks to contributions from Kurt E.  To increase the Serial1 transmit buffer, you use Serial1.addMemoryForWrite().

You create an array of bytes to serve as the extra memory.  The array MUST be either static or global scope, because Serial1 will continue using it long after the current function ends.

When this program is run with extra buffer memory, the green trace never stops.  The loop() function never stalls waiting on Serial1.write() because the buffer is now large enough to hold the entire outgoing message.

Of course, you can also increase the receive buffer with Serial1.addMemoryForRead().  If your program spends time doing lengthy computations or other work while serial data is arriving at a high baud rate, extra buffer memory can help avoid the loss of incoming bytes.

 

More Serial RX & CTS Pin Choices

Teensyduino 1.54 also brings more choices for which pins to use to receive serial data and flow control signals, on Teensy 4.0, 4.1, and MicroMod.  Thanks to another contribution from Kurt E, you can now use pins 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 30, 31, 32, 33 with any of the Serial1 to Serial8 setRX(pin) and attachCts(pin) functions.

Normally the serial signals connect to the pins through a multiplexer which allows 1 of 8-10 peripherals to control the pin.  This new feature automatically routes the serial receive and CTS receive signals through the “XBAR” (crossbar trigger network) peripheral to open up many more choices than could be configured using only the normal pin multiplexers.

This is particularly valuable for use of hardware RTS / CTS flow control, which allows fast baud rates up to 6 Mbit/sec to be used reliably with “normal” programs which may not always read incoming data rapidly.  Serial1 to Serial8 support transmitting RTS on any pin, but with prior software, only Serial3 and Serial5 on Teensy 4.x could receive CTS (and Serial5 only supported CTS on a SD card pin).  Now RTS / CTS flow control can be used easily with any of the 8 serial ports.

One caveat, however, is each serial port may only route one input signal through the XBAR peripheral.  For each serial port, you may use either setRX() or attachCts() with these special XBAR pins, but not both.

 

Improved map()

Arduino’s map() function provides a convenient way to scale a number from one range to another.  One common use is scaling the analog input pins, which give 0 to 1023 with default settings, to another range, such as 1 to 100.

Traditionally, map() has worked only with integer numbers.  For example, mapping 1-10 to 4-21:

Sometimes you may want more precision.  With Teensyduino 1.54, map() now automatically uses floating point math, if the input variable is float or double type.  You can store your number into a float variable, or convert it to float right at the map input.

Of course, if you want the traditional integer-based map(), simply use an integer type for the input.  Internally, a little C++ template magic is used to automatically use the integer version when your input is an integer type, or the float version when your input is float or double.  If using 64 double, the math is done with full 64 bit precision.

Arduino map() has a long history of suffering integer round-off errors.  For most applications, these errors are small and never noticed.  But they are errors nonetheless.

Teensyduino 1.54 fixes the integer map() equation, so the integer results agree with the precise floating point results, when the float numbers are properly rounded to the nearest integer.

 

delayNanoseconds() on all Teensy Models

All Teensy models now have a delayNanoseconds() function, even on Teensy 2.0.  When you need a very short delay, this function is simple and easy to use.

Often the actual delay will often be slightly longer than requested.  Just like delayMicroseconds() and delay() for milliseconds, it will always delay for at least the time specified.

In this simple example, a 140ns delay is used between changing a pin.  The actual resulting pulse measures 159ns.

Internally, delayNanoseconds() is implemented differently on Teensy 2 & 3 than on Teensy 4.  The older boards use a simple busy loop with “nop” instructions.  This gives the best performance on those older & simpler architectures.  But if an interrupt occurs during the delay time, the delay continues after the interrupt without any awareness its total time was lengthened.

Teensy 4 has a very different delayNanoseconds() implementation.  Because Cortex-M7 relies on caching both data and instructions, and uses multiple types of memory with very different latency for cache misses, busy looping is not as predictable as with the older architectures.  Instead, the desired nanoseconds are converted to CPU cycles, and the a wait loop polls the ARM DWT cycle counter.  While this adds overhead before the delay begins, the result is highly predictable results regardless of memory & cache.  An added benefit is resilience to interrupts which may occur during the delay.

Normally delayNanoseconds() is used with a constant input for the nanosecond time.  Inline code is used, where the compiler is able to better optimize results when the input is a constant.  However, variables not known as constants at compile time may be used.  All 32 bit boards still give fairly good results.  On Teensy 2.0, use of variable input results in delay precision of about 1 microsecond.

 

Detailed Memory Usage Report

Prior Teensyduino versions used Arduino’s default memory usage summary after compiling.

For Teensy 4, this simple memory report leaves much to be desired.

Teensy 4.0 & MicroMod have 3 distinct memories.  Teensy 4.1 has 4 distinct memory areas, if PSRAM chip(s) have been added.

Arduino’s simple memory usage also assumes RAM is only used for variables and flash is only used for code.  On Teensy 4 boards, the RAM1 memory is partially used for code.  Because the hardware supports partitioning RAM between Instruction Tightly Couple Memory (ITCM) and Data TCM in 32K blocks, a portion of the last 32K block of ITCM is unused padding.

Teensyduino 1.54 brings a more detailed memory usage summary which shows how each of the 3 or 4 memory regions are actually used.

Flash memory usage is given in more detail.  One common issue is large arrays of constant data, such as lookup tables to speed computations or digital media like sound clips & fonts, can be mistakenly allocated to RAM.  The report now shows how much is data versus code, so you can easily see the change in data stored in flash while working with such const data arrays.

A portion of flash memory usage is reported as “headers”.  Slightly over 4K at the beginning of flash memory is reserved for data used by the IMXRT startup process.  3K at the end of your program is reserved for a digital signature.  Up to 2K of padding may be used to align these areas to 1K boundaries.  By reporting these as “headers”, they’re not mixed in with the code and data your program uses, giving you a more accurate view of how your program is really using the flash memory.

 

Fault Recovery & CrashReport

Teensy 4.0, 4.1 & MicroMod have a Memory Protection Unit (MPU) built into the ARM Cortex-M7 processor.  The MPU allows permissions and caching configuration to be established on up to 16 memory regions.  This is much simpler than a Memory Management Unit (MMU) found in PCs, which translates addresses to implement virtual memory.  The MPU only enforces permissions, such as whether reading, writing or code execution is allowed in each memory region.

Since the earliest Teensy 4.0 beta tests, the MPU has been configured with security conscious settings, such as only allowing code to execute from flash and ITCM memory regions and disallowing any access from a NULL pointer.  But if your program “crashed” by violating any MPU permissions or otherwise caused a fault exception, the default fault handler was essentially empty.  Teensy 4.0 & 4.1 would stop responding and a press of the pushbutton was needed to recover.

Teensyduino 1.54 includes an improved default fault handler to recover from problems and give you information to help diagnose what went wrong.  The new fault handler performs these actions.

1. Log processor state & other useful info to RAM
2. Reduce CPU speed to 198 MHz
3. Complete USB transmission, so all Serial.print() data buffered before the fault (hopefully) arrives at the Arduino Serial Monitor
4. Try to remain USB responsive to Arduino’s Upload button
5. Automatically reboot after 8 seconds

Because this fault handler is built into all programs, and because it runs when something has gone very wrong, its code is meant to be kept simple & small.  Diagnostic info is written to a fixed location in RAM (which is preserved when restarting), rather than communicated at the time of the fault.

The automatic reboot may controversial.  Rebooting tends to hide the fact a problem occurred.  For most applications where Teensy always runs an application specific program, automatically restarting to recover from a problem is probably better than remaining forever unresponsive.

The 8 second delay was chosen for 2 reasons.  Traditionally watchdog timers are used for automatic rebooting.  If any of the 3 watchdogs are in use, they can function normally if configured for less than 8 seconds.  The 8 second delay is also meant to prevent a rapid infinite rebooting loop in the case where the program quickly causes another fault.  Hopefully 8 seconds is a good balance between promptly recovering, avoiding difficult to understand reboot-loop behavior, and allowing normal watchdog usage.

After Teensy reboots, your program can access the logged information with CrashReport.  The CrashReport code is only built into your program if you actually use it.  While your program can use CrashReport at any time, it is meant to be used early in your program’s startup, hopefully before anything has gone wrong, so you have fully access to a freshly rebooted system.

The simplest CrashReport usage is with a single Serial.print() line.

If your program previously crashed with a fault or unused interrupt which logged information, CrashReport shows you a summary.

CrashReport can be tested as true/false, to tell you whether information was logged.  You might use this with a program that rapidly prints to the serial monitor, to show the info and wait for input before continuing on to run the program which quickly scrolls the CrashReport info off your screen.

CrashReport is not limited to use with only the Arduino Serial Monitor.  It can be used with any interface inheriting the Arduino Print class.  For example, you can store CrashReport to a file on a SD card or a flash chip with LittleFS, to keep a record of every time a fault was detected.

The default fault handler and CrashReport can not handle every possible error.  The MyFault library was created as a collection of test cases for fault recovery and CrashReport, and also has a typical usage example.

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

Teensyduino 1.54 also includes many bug fixes, minor features & improvements, and updated libraries.  A detailed list of all changes can be found on this forum announcement thread.

Teensy 4.1 is now available with access more I/O and memory expansion.

Teensy 4.1 features a 10/100 Mbit Ethernet PHY.

The Ethernet port also has IEEE1588 precision packet timestamping.

Fast Ethernet opens up possibility for low latency & high bandwidth Artnet LED projects, streaming audio, open sound control and other Ethernet-based protocols that were difficult to accomplish with a traditional SPI-based Ethernet shield.  Traditionally use of Ethernet in a project has involved a choice of single board computers with high bandwidth Ethernet using systems not designed for low latency tasks, versus microcontrollers designed for real-time tasks but with slow Ethernet or lacking performance to handle Ethernet’s speed.  Teensy 4.1 with a Cortex-M7 processor at 600 MHz opens up the possibility to use the high bandwidth and low latency of Ethernet on a microcontroller designed for real-time tasks.

Teensy 4.1 includes a USB host port, supporting 480 Mbit/sec high speed USB.  While Teensy 4.0 has those USB host data signals on surface mount pads, Teensy 4.1 adds the hot-plugging power management needed to simply connect a USB host cable and be able to plug in a USB device.  Or a USB hubs can be used to connect many USB devices.

USB devices are supported by the USBHost_t36 library, which is installed into the Arduino IDE automatically by the Teensyduino installer.

Another feature technically present on Teensy 4.0, but difficult to use, is native SDIO for fast data transfer to a SD card.  Teensy 4.1 includes the SD socket, so you can easily use a micro SD card with the card’s native SDIO protocol rather than slow SPI access.

Teensy 4.1 also includes locations to solder additional memory chips.  The larger space is meant for a QSPI flash memory and the smaller space is intended for a 8MB PSRAM chip.

The IMXRT1062 microcontroller on Teensy 4.0 and 4.1 has 1MB of RAM built in.  For many real-time control projects, the internal RAM is plenty.  But some projects can greatly benefit from the added memory.  Frame buffers for high resolution TFT displays are the most common use, allowing advanced graphics rendering.  Large memory is also very useful for special audio effects like advanced reverb, buffering fast incoming data before logging to a SD card, and for emulation of retro computer systems like classic arcade games.

 

These extra memory chips have a dedicated QSPI bus, which is independent from Teensy 4.1’s main program memory.  When a flash memory chip added for storage of files or other data, this dedicated bus means it does not interfere with normal program memory access.  This is especially valuable while writing data or erasing sectors in the extra flash memory.  For real time projects controller motors, synthesizing or processing real-time audio, communicating high speed data or other tasks requiring low latency, flash writing can be done to the extra flash chip without blocking access to the normal program memory.

Teensy 4.1’s larger form factor also bring more I/O pins, and makes the difficult-to-access bottom pads from Teensy 4.0 very easy to access, breadboard-friendly pins.  The new I/O pins bring an 8th serial port, more analog inputs and PWM outputs, and access to 16 contiguous native port pins, useful for projects needing fast parallel I/O.

Not every project requires so much I/O or extra memory.  Teensy 4.0 fills those needs.  But when you do need more I/O, more memory, fast Ethernet, or connecting USB devices or fast SD card access, the larger Teensy 4.1 brings this extra I/O capability to a platform designed for real-time use with fast 600 MHz M7 performance.

Teensy 4.0 is now available.

Teensy 4.0 features a 600 MHz Cortex-M7 processor, dramatically faster than prior Teensy models & other microcontrollers!

Please see the Teensy 4.0 product page for more details.

 

Teensyduino version 1.44 has been released.

The 1.44 installers are available at the downloads page.

Arduino 1.8.7 Support

Only a few weeks after 1.8.6, Arduino released 1.8.7.  With a new Arduino comes a new Teensyduino release to support it.

Arduino 1.8.7 fixes several rare but serious bugs, including issues with the IDE being able to start up.  1.8.7 adds no new features, so there’s no need to upgrade from 1.8.6, unless you’ve encountered issues.

Wavetable Synthesis

A little over 1 year ago, a group of students at Portland State University (Ryan Mellmer, Nicholas Craig, Joshua Bucklin, Aida Keifer, Jonathan Jensen, Yu Tang, Connor Delaplane) completed their capstone project to perform wavetable sound synthesis, for playing of musical notes from sound samples.  PJRC provided hardware and Paul “sponsored” the group.  Dr. Bart Massey advised.

The complete code was published on github.  Now with 1.44, this project has been integrated into the Audio library.  It’s now available in the design tool, and the examples can be accessed in Arduino by clicking File > Examples > Audio > Synthesis > Wavetable.

Wavetable data is stored in Teensy’s internal flash memory.  To create the data, Ryan’s team create a Python utility to import and convert Soundfont format files.

A version of their SoundfontDecoder updated for the Audio library is also available on github.

Faster Ports Menu

Teensyduino 1.42 greatly improved how Teensy is shown in Arduino’s Tools > Ports menu.  But under some circumstances on Macintosh and Windows, a noticeable lag could occur when clicking the Tools menu.  1.44 eliminates this interactive delay, so the Tools menu responds quickly.

The Teensy specific Ports menu is implemented by a native helper program called “teensy_ports”, which Arduino automatically runs at startup.  Because this is a native program, it can gain detailed info about USB devices which isn’t available to Java code in the Arduino IDE.  In 1.42 & 1.43, when you clicked the Ports menu, a query was sent to this program.  When it responded, the info would be put into the Ports menu.  But if anything caused a delay in the response, you would see that delay in the appearance of the Tools menu.

Version 1.44 changes teensy_ports to always send USB device changes as they occur.  A dedicated Java thread listens for the incoming USB info and keeps a list of devices in the IDE updated.  When you click the Tools menu, rather than requiring communication back-and-forth, the list already in the IDE’s memory is copied for use by the menu.

This improvement was partially motivated by a conversation with the Arduino developers.  They intend to eventually allow boards like Teensy to provide their own port “discovery” tools, using a JSON-based format.  This is one of the major missing features which requires Teensy to have a special installer, rather than using Arduino’s Boards Manager.

Another benefit of switching to the JSON format, which allows communicating all info Arduino uses, is the Tools > Get board Info menu now works with Teensy.

The multithreaded JSON-based Ports menu was developed on 1.8.6 and ported to 1.8.7 and back-ported to 1.8.5, so you get this speedup on any of those versions.

Linux 64 bit ARM (AARCH64)

Arduino 1.8.7 is the first non-beta Arduino release which supports Linux on 64 bit ARM, also known as “AARCH64”.  Jetson TX1, Jetson TX2 and Odroid C2 are the main platforms needing AARCH64 support today.

However, Arduino’s downloads page still has ARM64 only on the hourly build and beta build sections.  The Arduino 1.8.7 ARM64 file is actually on their server and can be accessed by copying the link to the ARM32 version, and replace “arm” with “aarch64”.

The final hold-up is due to Oracle’s Java runtime environment (JRE) for 64 bit ARM.  It is “headless”, meaning it only supports command line programs.  Unlike the other Linux copies, there is no “java” folder with the correct Java runtime.  As a result, the IDE will use whatever Java runtime exists on your Linux system, which may or may not be compatible.

Here is a copy of Arduino 1.8.7 with a compatible copy of OpenJDK added in the “java” folder.  Other this this addition, it is identical to the Arduino 1.8.7 file on Arduino’s server.

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_144/arduino-1.8.7-linuxaarch64.tar.xz

Just extract this file, then download and run the Teensyduino 1.44 installer.  Like all Linux systems, Teensy’s udev rule file must be installed to access the USB device files.

The default kernel that ships with Jetson lacks the cdc_acm driver needed for USB serial communication.  You can still use Teensy without this this driver, because Teensy Loader uses HID protocol, and the new Ports menu is able to natively detect USB devices even when their drivers don’t load.  But to use the serial monitor with a Teensy programmed to be USB serial, you will need to install the cdc_acm driver.  If following those instructions, you may need to type “./installCDCACM.sh” to run the script, rather than “./installCDCACMModule.sh” as the instructions say.

Obviously AARCH64 support is very new.  If you encounter issues, please report them on the forum.

Today PJRC is releasing Teensyduino version 1.43.

The 1.43 installers are available now at the downloads page.

Arduino 1.8.6 Support

The main new feature in 1.43 is support for Arduino 1.8.6.  The main reason to upgrade is 1.8.6 can compile your code significantly faster.

Arduino 1.8.6 is the first non-beta Arduino IDE to support parallel compile.  If your computer has a quad-core processor, when rebuilding all files, Arduino may compile up to 4 pieces of code at the same time.  Usually the speed increase is much less than 4 times faster, but still it manages to compile code in much less time than running every compiler process 1 at a time.

When you change boards or settings, a full rebuild of all libraries files must be done for all library files your code uses.  Arduino 1.8.2 to 1.8.5 would often do this full rebuild unnecessarily, especially if you edited any of the library files (not in the Arduino IDE’s editor).  1.8.6 fixes this unnecessary rebuilding.

However, not everything is perfect with 1.8.6.  Several bugs were discovered after release which cause 1.8.6 to crash, especially if certain data files are corrupted.  Teensyduino 1.43 includes fixes for a couple of these bugs.  The rest will be fixed in Arduino 1.8.7, which may appear soon.  When it does, of course we’ll release Teensyduino 1.44 to support it.

Headless Install

The installer now support a “headless” command line install.  This can be useful if you wish to create scripts to automatically install Teensyduino.  The main intended use is for Continuous Integration testing with systems such as Travis-CI.

Run the installer with –dir=<directory> to specify the Arduino install location.  Using this option cases the installer to run automatically without the GUI.

Adafruit has offered to include Teensy in their automated testing script.  Soon this will allow Teensy to be automatically tested (at least to verify libraries compile without error) for all of Adafruit’s libraries!

Bugs Fixed

Several issues are fixed in version 1.43.

• Fix default Ethernet CS pins on Teensy 2.0 & Teensy++ 2.0.  Old versions of Ethernet would default to the “SS” pin on AVR chips, and if you wanted any other pin your only option was to edit the Ethernet library code!  With the addition of Ethernet.init(pin), you could choose which pin to use, but this change also caused the default to become pin 10, even if SS was a different pin on your board (as it is with Teensy 2.0 & Teensy++ 2.0).  Now the default is restored to the actual SS pin, and you can use Ethernet.init(pin).
• Fix USB Keyboard ‘#’ for UK & Irish layouts.
• Generic UDP class support beginMulticast.  Some libraries using multicast need this defined in the board’s core library.
• Fix USB MIDI hogging transmit buffers.  If you used USB MIDI together with USB Serial or other USB communication, and you transmit USB MIDI messages faster than your computer can process, previously the MIDI message could consume all the USB buffer memory.  This fix prevents MIDI from hogging all the buffers, so the other non-MIDI communication (hopefully) will not stall.
• Fix FreqCount for use at high frequencies.  A bug which caused very infrequent errors when measuring very high frequencies has been fixed.
• Fix SerialPlotter for Ports(Teensy).  Previously Arduino’s Serial Plotter would only work if you had selected Tools > Ports from the “Serial” section of the menu.  Now the “Teensy” ports section is fully supported.  When using a “Teensy” port, board disconnect and reconnect are supported.  The plot restarts from zero when you plug the cable in.  Proper stop and restart is also supported when you upload new code.
• USBHost_t36 fix for Gigabyte keyboard (thanks KurtE).  These special gaming keyboards with “N Key Rollover” should now work.
• OctoWS2811 update movie2serial.pde for compatibility with Processing 3.4.  This program streams video to large LED projects.  Minor updates were needed to work with the newest version of Processing and its video library.
• Remove BYTE define.  This was previously included in Teensyduino for pre-1.0 Arduino compatibility.  But some libraries and code tend to use “BYTE” for their own constants and variables, causing a conflict.  This feature for compatibility with ancient Arduino libraries was causing more harm than good.  It’s been removed.
• Update WS2812Serial documentation.  A mistake in the documentation showed an extra pin, which was never actually supported and can’t work due to hardware limitation.
• Improve installer help dialog on Windows.  The “Windows App” incompatible with Teensyduino.  The installer now mentions this in the “?” help dialog.
• Workaround a rare USB buffering issue.  During sustained fast data transfer from a PC to Teensy, a rare bug could cause wrong data to be received after many megabytes of transfer.  A workaround was added to prevent this problem.  Special thanks to Trammell Hudson for providing a test case.
• Fix for Arduino 1.8.6 startup (Arduino issue #7917).  If any library you have installed has a version number which Arduino 1.8.6 can’t understand, the IDE crashes at startup.  A fix for this problem is included, so you aren’t left with the software unable to run if you have a “bad” library installed.
• Add Arduino’s fix for slow 1.8.6 menus on Mac (Arduino issue #7935).  Newer versions of Java on Macintosh are much slower to create menus.  The Arduino developers worked around this problem by creating the menus only once, and they’re merely modified when changes are needed.  Teensyduino 1.43 adds this fix to your copy of 1.8.6.

 

 

Today PJRC is releasing Teensyduino version 1.42.

Here’s a detailed look at 1.42’s many new features and improvements.

I’d like to thank everyone who contributed & beta tested, especially Defragster!

The 1.42 installers are available now at the downloads page.

Arduino IDE Ports Menu & Serial Monitor

Since 2009 Teensy has supported non-Serial USB types (selected in the Tools > USB Type menu), but Arduino’s Ports menu has worked only with Serial devices.  1.42 extends the Ports menu with a new “Teensy” section capable of showing every USB type Teensy implements.

In this screenshot, 3 Teensy boards are connected, but only 1 is programmed to be Serial.

Teensyduino’s non-Serial modes include a HID interface to emulate serial, so you can still use Serial.print() to the Arduino Serial Monitor.  Arduino’s “Serial ports” list is still present, where you would select “(emulated serial)” to use those other boards.  The new “Teensy” ports list allows you clearly see which boards are really connected and to precisely choose the one you want.

Selections from this new Teensy Ports list are based on the physical USB port, plus any USB hubs.  This info is shown in the lower right corner.

Here “usb2/2-1/2-1.2/2-1.2.2” is a Linux syntax meaning port 2 of a hub plugged into port 1 of the 2nd USB controller.  Similar codes are used on Windows and Macintosh.  These physical location codes allow Arduino to target exactly the board you’ve selected, even when it changes USB type.

Physical location allows Teensy auto-reboot to know exactly which Teensy you wish to upload.  Previously (and still if you don’t select from the Teensy ports list) attempting to reboot required searching and trying to reboot whatever boards were found.  If your Teensy isn’t responding to USB (interrupts disabled, deep sleep, etc) the auto-reboot process won’t search for other boards.  It ends quickly.  Of course no software on a PC or Mac can get your Teensy to report if it’s not communicating on the USB, which is why every Teensy is made with a button to force entering programming mode.

When you open the Arduino Serial Monitor with a board selected in the Teensy Ports list, a special version of the serial monitor customized to Teensy is used.

You can easily tell it apart from the normal serial monitor because it lacks the baud rate drop-down selection.  Teensy USB always communicates at full USB speed, not the serial baud rate.

This new serial monitor has many features you can’t easily see.  If you unplug your Teensy while it’s open, the USB disconnect is automatically detected.  Likewise, reconnecting (on the same physical USB port) is automatically detected.  Access to the hardware is done by a native “teensy_serialmon” helper program, rather than a Java serial library, which is meant to solve rare but difficult communication problems some people encounter.

If you want to use the old way, via the Java serial library, just select from the “Serial ports” part of the Ports menu.  Look for the baud rate drop-down list to confirm you’re using the traditional serial monitor.

256K RAM Usable on Teensy 3.5

Some NXP/Freescale’s documentation for the MK64FX512 chip used on Teensy 3.5 says 192K of RAM.  Other documentation says 256K.  We have recently confirmed all these chips really do have 256K RAM.

Teensyduino 1.42 enables access to all 256K, except the last 8 bytes.  Teensy Loader looks at the initial stack address to deduce which board you selected when compiling.  Future versions may improve how the intended board is communicated.  With 1.42, you get to 65528 more bytes of RAM for variables on Teensy 3.5.

USB Touchscreen Emulation

Many modern PCs have touchscreens, which is distinctly different then simply a mouse, because they can track the position of up to 10 fingers.

Starting with 1.42, Teensy can emulate a 10-finger tracking touchscreen.  This quick video demo shows how it works.

After installing 1.42, click File > Examples > Teensy > USB_Touchscreen > TenFingerCircle to open the example used in this video.

Windows, Linux and some Android systems support multi-touch screens.  Unfortunately no Apple Macintosh computers recognize USB multi-touch devices yet.

Audio Library New Features

Many great new features have been added to the Teensy Audio Library for 1.42.  For this article I had wanted to shoot video demos, but the time required would mean holding up the 1.42 release.  For now, here’s a quick summary with photos.  I hope to bring you another detailed article next week with more details.

Audio: FreeVerb

FreeVerb was added, in both mono and stereo.  It implements the high quality reverb algorithm as published by “Jezar” at Dreamport.  FreeVerb’s quality is better than the reverb effect contributed a couple years ago by Joao Rossi FIlho.  However, it uses more memory.  The stereo FreeVerb requires Teensy 3.5 or 3.6, due to RAM usage.

FreeVerb has 2 tunable parameters for “room size” and “damping” to give you control over the effect.  Of course, you can also add a mixer using the FreeVerb “wet” output with the original “dry” signal to tune how strongly the reverb effect is heard.

Audio: Granular Pitch Shift & Freeze

John-Mike of Bleep Labs contributed a granular processing effect.  In the freeze mode it repeatedly replays a short segment of the sound you recently heard.

Pitch shift mode captures grains continuously and plays them back windows overlapping, interpolated to a different speed.  When the parameters are set well, it results in a pretty good real-time pitch shift.  Of course you can also set the parameters not-so-well if you wish to hear a very grainy output!

Audio: Waveforms

The generic waveform synthesis was greatly improve for 1.42, inspired by Bleep Labs, though in the end new code was written.

Variable Triangle has been added to the waveform synthesis, which allows you to change continuously from a sawtooth to triangle.

A long-standing bug with the phase(angle) function has been fixed in 1.42.  You can now create 2 or more waveforms and control their relative phase shift.  Of course all of the waveforms work down to nearly zero, so any can be used as low frequency oscillators (LFOs) to control or sequence effects or other synthesis, now with full control over relative phase timing.

A new modulated waveform synthesis object has also been added.

Previously only Sine_FM offered modulation.  It was limited to one octave of frequency change, and the modulating signal varied the waveform period, which isn’t the proper “volt per octave” model.

The new waveform modulation allows you modulate the frequency of any of the 9 waveforms.  Up to 12 octaves are available (the range is configurable), allowing you to modulate even a sub-sonic LFO all the way up to the top of human hearing range!  The modulating signal uses proper exponential “volt per octave” scaling.

You can also configure the modulation to affect the waveform phase, for 8 of the 9 waveforms.  The amount of phase shifting is also configurable, up to 9000 degrees (±25 full waveform cycles).

Waveform modulation also has a 2nd input, to allow any signal to modulate the Pulse duty cycle and Variable Triangle waveform shape.

Audio: Pulse Density Modulated (PDM) Input

Some very low cost microphones have a special 1-wire pulse density output signal, which must be low-pass filtered to recover the audio signal.

Teensy now supports these PDM signals.  The low-pass filter is implemented as a single 512-tap FIR filter, which should have much better passband performance than the Cascaded Integrator Comb (CIC) filters typically used.  But this does come at a computation cost, approximately 39% CPU usage when running Teensy at 96 MHz.

Audio: Other Improvements

Support for the WM8731 codec chip has been improved, with the ability to properly select between its microphone vs line input.

The envelope effect now offers status functions to tell if it’s active, and whether its sustain period as ended.  When you use multiple envelopes to create (polyphonic) notes from oscillators or continuous other sound sources, these can help you better select which envelope is not currently “busy” to avoid truncating in-progress sounds.

The WAV file player and wav2sketch utility have been updated to handle unusual WAV files containing junk sections or other metadata before the format section.  Now you can use these WAV files without having to convert them.

A simple “amp” object has been added, meant for switch signals, or amplifying or attenuating.

While this functionality has long been available by using only 1 channel of a mixer, consistent feedback from users has shown that placing a mixer into a graphical design simply does not feel right.  Of course, the amp implements the cases of gain=0 and gain=1.0 by skipping all the math for efficient switching of signals.

Updates have also been made to audio library documentation in the design tool (right side panel).  As the audio library continue to grow, documenting its many features well is becoming ever more important.

Compile Speedup

1.42 has changes to speed up fully recompiling your project.  When Arduino prints “Build options changed, rebuilding all”, you’ll still have to wait, but hopefully not nearly as long.

The main improvement comes from removing “#include <algorithm> from wiring.h”.  Version 1.41 brought a greatly improved map() function which automatically detects if the variable you’re translating is an integer or floating point number.  This magic depends on C++14 features, so wiring.h had this and other includes added.

It turns out nearly all of the extra compile time is due to that one #include <algorithm> header.  It has been removed, and map() still works, still automatically detecting integer versus floating point.

1.42 also changes the build process to use a pre-compiled header for Arduino.h (which in turn includes wiring.h).  This offers some additional speed improvement, but only about a 20% reduction for most programs.

Teensy Loader Improvements

Teensy Loader has a little-known feature to show you detailed information.  Few people know of this because it’s hidden in a place nobody would look, the Help menu.

The Verbose Information window now shows events from the helper programs Teensyduino uses from Arduino, as well as the events from within Teensy Loader itself.

The events are now timestamped with millisecond resolution.  Normally this level of detailed logging isn’t needed, but when “strange” USB problems occur, a log of all the events from every software component can really help.

Teensy Loader has only a few dialog boxes.  The most important ones, alerting you to problems like the wrong board, have long been non-modal to prevent blocking event logging and responding to Arduino.  Help > About and File > Open are also non-modal, completely eliminating modal behavior.

Teensy Loader’s internal graphics handling and memory management were improved.

Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes

USB Host support on Teensy 3.6 received small improvements.  KurtE updated the Joystick support.  A bug impacting certain hubs was also fixed.

The Serial boolean, used to check if the Arduino Serial Monitor is open, has been improved.

Teensy’s support for X-Plane flight simulator received a fix to FlightSimFloat on Teensy 3.5 and 3.6.  The Flightsim+Joystick USB type was also updated, fixing a problem where it would not be recognized by the TeensyControls X-plane plugin

A small speedup to analogWrite for DAC pins was made.

The startup delay in Teensyduino’s initialization code was reduced from 400 to 300 ms, and changes were made to begin USB enumeration sooner.  While instant startup might seem highly desirable, too-fast startup tends to cause compatibility issues with many Arduino libraries, which do not properly wait for external hardware – because all Arduino boards have slow startup.

A bug in DMAChannel.h transferSize() affecting Teensy LC was fixed.

USB Keyboard KEY_MEDIA_RANDOM_PLAY was fixed.

EthernetClient received a fix for forced connection close.

A subtle timing problem in OctoWS2811 affecting Teensy 3.5 was fixed.

When compiling on 32 bit Teensy boards, “narrowing conversion” is now treated as only a compiler warning, not an error, as has always been done on 8 bit boards.  This allows some poorly written libraries to “just work” even though their code is a bit sloppy.

Ethernet.init(cspin) is now documented in all the Ethernet examples, and on the Ethernet page.  This function is an Adafruit extension which PJRC adopted for Teensy’s version of the Ethernet library, but until now it wasn’t actually documented.

Libraries ADC, OneWire, PS2Keyboard, SerialFlash, Time, TimeAlarms (included in the Teensyduino installer) were updated.

The Macintosh version is now 64 bits software, as required by the newest High Sierra and future versions of MacOS.

Arduino Versions Supported

Support for Arduino 1.8.2 and 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 has been dropped.  The new ports menu and serial monitor are only implemented on Arduino 1.8.5.

Teensyduino is continuing to support 3 old versions of Arduino.  Arduino 1.8.1 was the last version before major changes in Arduino’s “arduino-builder” program.  Arduuino 1.6.5-r5 was the last version before “arduino-builder”, where the entire build process is controlled by the Java code in the Arduino IDE.  Arduino 1.0.6 was the last version of the very old 1.0 series.

Arduino appears to have entered a period of slower release.  Through 2016-2017, Arduino made 12 stable releases.  Since releasing 1.8.5 in September 2017, they started a 1.9 beta but haven’t made any non-beta releases.  If this trend continue, we may explore supporting specific 1.9 beta versions.

At the recent San Mateo Maker Faire, Massimo Banzi announced a developer summit.  PJRC will be participating.  My personal hope is we can move the entire Arduino ecosystem forward with contributions like EventResponder.  I plan to write more detailed articles about this effort as it develops.

Recently work was also done to support Linux 64 ARM (Aarch64), testing on nVidia Jetson TX2.  While Aarch64 support is still considered “experimental” and not part of the stable 1.42 release, if you’re interested in running on Linux 64 bit ARM, please see the last 1.42 beta for an Aarch64 build that’s essentially the same as this 1.42 release.

Years ago I used to add photos and links people emailed to this Teensy projects page.  I’ve also occasionally written blog articles on the DorkbotPDX site over the last 9 years.

Recently at Maker Faire I talked with Mike Szczys, about writing and sharing of knowledge in the Maker Community.  I’m determined to step up my writing game with this blog!  Robin & I also want to restart showcasing the many awesome projects people make with Teensy.