Which Teensy to use?

[TomD]

I want to use a Teensy for a project to make controls for Flight Simulator, just basic joystick stuff at first, but have the capacity to expand later if I want. Given that the 3.2 and the 4.0 are basically the same price, should I get the 4.0, or would that be way overkill and possibly make the project harder to implement; or should I just go with the lower cost LC? I have an electronics background, but would be new to the coding. Thanks.

 

[MichaelMeissner]

I want to use a Teensy for a project to make controls for Flight Simulator, just basic joystick stuff at first, but have the capacity to expand later if I want. Given that the 3.2 and the 4.0 are basically the same price, should I get the 4.0, or would that be way overkill and possibly make the project harder to implement; or should I just go with the lower cost LC? I have an electronics background, but would be new to the coding. Thanks.

There are a few things that the Teensy 4.0 does not have that the Teensy 3.2 has. In terms of physical characteristics this includes:

• The ability to emit analog mono sound -- the Teensy 4.0 has two sets of digital sound buses, but if you wanted a simple sound output, the simplest might be the 3.2. Note, while the LC also has mono analog output, it can't run a lot of the audio library since the LC uses a slower Arm M0 processor, and the audio library was written using Arm M4 instructions found in the Teensy 3.2, 3.5, 3.6, and 4.0. You can use the audio shield for more complex sound processing (be sure to get revision d for the Teensy 4.0 and revision C for the 3.2/3.5/3.6). Or you can use cheaper add-on boards that can play digital I2S sounds;
• The ability to receive 5v digital input -- The Teensy 3.2 and 3.5 can receive 5v input, while the LC, 3.6, and 4.0 can be damaged if they get more than 3.3v on the digital pins (this should be less of an issue unless you have specific 5v devices);
• Some of the pins on the 3.2 (and LC, 3.6 but not 3.5 or 4.0) can act as touch inputs. Unfortunately there is not much any documentation in the library for this (but I can point you to some older links).

Then there are the things in the library that haven't yet been ported to Teensy 4.0. I don't have a handle on which these are, but for many of these, they may appear in future Teensydunio releases. A lot of the USB stuff went into recent releases. The ones called out are USB flight sim, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and MIDI.

Don't worry about it being 'overkill'. Sure maybe it has a lot more memory than you need, and is faster, but maybe some day you will need that memory or speed.

Note, if you are using a shield made for the Teensy 3.2, the basic important pins (first serial port, first SPI bus, first I2C bus, analog pins, basic digital pins) are all in the same location. Depending on the shield, it may or may not use the extra functionality that uses different pins (digital sound, extra serial ports, extra i2/spi buses, etc.).