Hello friends of Wilderness Labs!

Bryan here, and I’m super excited to break the news on a piece of technical art we’ve been working on for the last year, the Meadow F7v2 board:

The F7v2 is the successor to our popular F7v1 board and includes a number of upgrades, including:

  • 64MB of Flash – This is an upgrade from 32MB in v1, and with only 4MB or reserved system space, a whopping 60MB is now user accessible.
  • Upgraded Antenna – We changed out the antenna with a new model that has 10x better performance. In fact, we get better WiFi performance out of the board than our iPhones!
  • Fully SMT-Compatible – The F7v2 has hybrid, castellated-header/IO mounts that allow for use as both a through-hole (PTH) device, as well as a surface mount device (SMD/SMT). Additionally, there are no components on the underside, so it will solder flush without impediment.
  • I2S Sound – Coming soon via Meadow.Core APIs, we’ve added a full set of hardware IO for inter-integrated sound, which enables both I2S microphone input, and sound output.
  • Low-power Timer Input – Also available soon in software, F7v2 includes a pin that has a low-power timer that can count pulses even while the board is asleep!
  • Upgraded Silkscreen Design – The new silk screen makes bus IO identification much easier.
  • Fixed Battery Voltage – A bug in the design of v1.0 meant that the 3V3 rail could dip as low as 3.0V when being powered by a battery via the integrated battery connector/charging circuit. In the v2, we’ve changed the power components to make sure that the full 3.3V is available.
  • Better Buttons – We also swapped out the buttons on the board with high-quality Wurth Elektrik buttons that have a greater surface area and a much nicer click.
  • Open Source – We’ll be open-sourcing the design soon. This will allow folks to use it with other platform technologies, or even build their own boards based on our design.

We know that a lot of you have been waiting to purchase a Meadow board, and we’re also really excited to let you know that they’re now available for purchase in the Wilderness Labs Store and will be shipping next week!

Get a Meadow F7v2

See you on the next post!

‍