Review on 🔧 Wio Terminal by Seeed Studio: A Compatible Wonder for Your Projects by Nicholas Peters

A mostly positive review first, read the positive parts. But we will start with problems. Because if you plan to use this device for anything other than basic training, you will encounter hurdles. compatible with other devices, which is good. However, as with many other devices, this is achieved by hacking existing open source Arduino libraries to work with the device. In the case of the Wio terminal, the libraries are an amalgamation of Arduino, AdaFruit, and Seeed code wrapped around the official Atmel libraries in a chaotic mess. designed to support multiple devices and chipsets, rather than providing each with its own drivers. What can I expect from this device and screen when I first boot up a device and write a simple screen scraping app to determine the base refresh rate, what did I find? Wio: Max 9fps by simply clearing the screen on a 200MHz microprocessor. are you kidding? For comparison, a 16MHz Arduino with the same 9341 LCD achieves 15 fps. Using this device (and admittedly experience writing drivers for the 9341 LCD) I was able to write a driver that would bring images onto the screen (instead of just erasing them) at 40 frames per second. It seems other peripheral drivers provided for the device have similar issues and layer open source software on top of other open source software to make it work. What does this mean for students and people who just tinker? Not much, the software works, it's just incredibly inefficient. However, for those trying to make full (or even moderate) use of the device, be aware that you will be writing all your own drivers for the device's hardware. You must understand that this is in it. *Good facilities* And what about the facilities? The onboard Cortex-M4 includes an additional floating-point joint processing core and can be overclocked up to 200MHz, which is really nice. independently sync to match the target peripheral, which is great since some peripherals like MicroSD don't run above certain speeds. A business. wow: the case is very impressive, small, good weight, high quality plastic, integrated mounting threads (metal not plastic), well balanced and feels good in the hand (ever picked up an iPhone after a cheaper smartphone? Yes, something like that .) This is where the hardware side of things gets mediocre. The screen is nice and bright but only supports up to 320x240. Additionally, the screen and microprocessor are connected via SPI instead of the faster parallel connection supported by the LCD driver. This requires more CPU when rendering, giving you fewer cycles for actual processing. The device has only 192 KB of RAM. That's it. Let me repeat that. only 192KB of RAM. Just enough for the framebuffer and no other data in memory; or sufficient for other data but limited performance due to constant writing directly to the LCD driver (via SPI). *Summary* Overall this is a good device. For those just hooking up Grove modules, wiring or fiddling around with LEDs and switches; this device is great. For potential power users, read the details and consider the limitations. Personally, I still think this device is a winner and am considering getting another one. But your experience will depend on what you can or want to fit into the device.