#matrixportals3

There's nothing like hefting a brand new panel of PCBs, ready to be snapped-apart and tested! this board is a refresh of our Matrix Portal M4 board - SAMD51's are unavailable for the near future so it's a great excuse to do a redesign…here we've got an 8MB Flash + 2MB PSRAM S3 with wifi, bluetooth, and a parallel-driving peripheral that does a great job driving RGB LED Matrices. we also fixed a common request by adding mounting holes and a 2x8 IDC connector up top so you can either plug directly into a panel or use a cable.

We are gettin' really really close to putting the new Matrix Portal S3 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5778 into the shop, here's a tester we use to burn in the self-test code. The RP2040 brains https://github.com/adafruit/RP2040-Based-Tester-Brains-PCB resets the S3 into the ROM bootloader, the sends over compressed binaries via USB. when the self-test starts up it notices that it's in the test jig and performs a self test of the GPIO and voltages. once done, it turns into a demo board that has a basic matrix display output for users to verify functionality. This way we only have to program the board once!