The Feather 32u4 Radio is chock-full of microcontroller goodness. There's also a lot of pins and ports. We'll take you a tour of them now!

Note that the pinouts are identical for both the Feather 32u4 RFM69 and LoRa radios - you can look at the silkscreen of the Feather to see it says "RFM69" or "LoRa"

Pinouts are also the same for both 433MHz and 900Mhz. You can tell the difference by looking for a colored dot on the chip or crystal of the radio, green/blue is 900MHz & red is 433MHz

Power Pins

  • GND - this is the common ground for all power and logic
  • BAT - this is the positive voltage to/from the JST jack for the optional Lipoly battery
  • USB - this is the positive voltage to/from the micro USB jack if connected
  • EN - this is the 3.3V regulator's enable pin. It's pulled up, so connect to ground to disable the 3.3V regulator
  • 3V - this is the output from the 3.3V regulator, it can supply 500mA peak

Logic pins

This is the general purpose I/O pin set for the microcontroller. All logic is 3.3V

  • #0 / RX - GPIO #0, also receive (input) pin for Serial1 and Interrupt #2
  • #1 / TX - GPIO #1, also transmit (output) pin for Serial1 and Interrupt #3
  • #2 / SDA - GPIO #2, also the I2C (Wire) data pin. There's no pull up on this pin by default so when using with I2C, you may need a 2.2K-10K pullup. Also Interrupt #1
  • #3 / SCL - GPIO #3, also the I2C (Wire) clock pin. There's no pull up on this pin by default so when using with I2C, you may need a 2.2K-10K pullup. Can also do PWM output and act as Interrupt #0.
  • #5 - GPIO #5, can also do PWM output
  • #6 - GPIO #6, can also do PWM output and analog input A7
  • #9 - GPIO #9, also analog input A9 and can do PWM output. This analog input is connected to a voltage divider for the lipoly battery so be aware that this pin naturally 'sits' at around 2VDC due to the resistor divider
  • #10 - GPIO #10, also analog input A10 and can do PWM output.
  • #11 - GPIO #11, can do PWM output.
  • #12 - GPIO #12, also analog input A11 and can do PWM output.
  • #13 - GPIO #13, can do PWM output and is connected to the red LED next to the USB jack
  • A0 thru A5 - These are each analog input as well as digital I/O pins.
  • SCK/MOSI/MISO - These are the hardware SPI pins, used by the RFM radio module too! You can use them as everyday GPIO pins if you don't activate the radio and keep the RFM CS pin high. However, we really recommend keeping them free as they should be kept available for the radio module. If they are used, make sure its with a device that will kindly share the SPI bus! Also used to reprogram the chip with an AVR programmer if you need.

RFM/SemTech Radio Module

Since not all pins can be brought out to breakouts, due to the small size of the Feather, we use these to control the radio module

  • #8 - used as the radio CS (chip select) pin
  • #7 - used as the radio GPIO0 / IRQ (interrupt request) pin.
  • #4 - used as the radio Reset pin

Since these are not brought out there should be no risk of using them by accident!

There are also breakouts for 3 of the RFM's GPIO pins (IO1, IO2 and IO3). You probably wont need these for most uses of the Feather but they are available in case you need 'em!

Other Pins!

  • RST - this is the Reset pin, tie to ground to manually reset the AVR, as well as launch the bootloader manually
  • ARef - the analog reference pin. Normally the reference voltage is the same as the chip logic voltage (3.3V) but if you need an alternative analog reference, connect it to this pin and select the external AREF in your firmware. Can't go higher than 3.3V!

This guide was first published on Apr 13, 2016. It was last updated on Mar 28, 2024.

This page (Pinouts) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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