Adafruit seesaw is a near-universal converter framework which allows you to add and extend hardware support to any I2C-capable microcontroller or microcomputer. Instead of getting separate I2C GPIO expanders, ADCs, PWM drivers, etc, seesaw can be configured to give a wide range of capabilities.

For example, our ATSAMD09 breakout with seesaw gives you

  • 3 x 12-bit ADC inputs
  • 3 x 8-bit PWM outputs
  • 7 x GPIO with selectable pullup or pulldown
  • 1 x NeoPixel output (up to 170 pixels)
  • 1 x EEPROM with 64 byte of NVM memory (handy for storing small access tokens or MAC addresses)
  • 1 x Interrupt output that can be triggered by any of the accessories
  • 2 x I2C address selection pins
  • 1 x Activity LED

But you can reprogram and reconfigure the chip to have more or less of each peripheral - as long as it fits into the ATSAMD09D14's firmware! For example, there's also a UART converter but it isn't included in the default firmware.

The ATSAMD09 breakout is great for development of seesaw capabilities (we use it in-house for our design work) or you can use it as-is to give your Raspberry Pi or ESP8266 more hardware support! Each breakout comes with the assembled and tested board, as well as some header strips.

Please note: The boards do not come with a bootloader. If you want to do development using seesaw you'll need to pick up a J-Link and we recommend a SWD adapter breakout - at this time our project is for Atmel Studio but you could probably get it working with arm gcc and a Makefile. We don't provide any support for custom builds of seesaw - we think this is cool and useful for the Maker community!

This guide was first published on Nov 01, 2017. It was last updated on Mar 14, 2024.

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

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