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The ATSAMD51 is an ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller manufactured by Microchip (Atmel).
[Adafruit Feather M4](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3857)
[squidworks module](https://gitlab.cba.mit.edu/squidworks/moduleboard-atsamd51/)
Since [Adafruit](https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather-m4-express-atsamd51) has adopted the
SAMD51, it is well supported by the open source community, and we can borrow their development
tools. For instructions on how to burn your board with a bootloader, see the
[bootloader](bootloader) directory.
Once you've got a bootloader on your board, you have a lot of options for programming it.
To write code and load it, Jake uses [PlatformIO](https://platformio.org/platformio-ide), which is an open source 'IOT' (embedded) programming tool written as a package for either [atom](https://atom.io/) code-editor, or [vscode](https://code.visualstudio.com/). See their doc for setting up a new project for the D51 / Feather M4.
We're not going to beat Adafruit's documentation on setting up the Arduino IDE, so just take a
gander over
[here](https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather-m4-express-atsamd51/using-with-arduino-ide). It's
their bootloader, after all.
One of the troubles with Arduino is that people forget that it is just a big C++ library. This means that everything under the sun (that compiles) is legal here. *That* means that we can use Arduino as a crutch, but write really nice Special Function Register code inside of the same executable. Great!
Indeed, in the PlatformIO environment, we even have wonderful autocomplete handles on the D51's core register map. For some examples of this kind of manipulation, check out the `hunks` in the [ponyo](https://gitlab.cba.mit.edu/squidworks/ponyo) project.