tips & tricks
Raspberry Pi RP2040 Boards Aplenty By Mathias Claußen (Elektor)
The RP2040 is the first microcontroller chip designed by the team at Raspberry Pi. It was first fitted to the maker-friendly Raspberry Pi Pico board, and since its introduction, it has also found its way onto boards and kits from third-party providers. It’s time to check out what they have to offer! The RP2040 is certainly an interesting alternative to the more established microcontrollers. Not only is the chip’s bang-per-buck ratio impressive, it currently enjoys a good level of availability. Documentation and support from the Raspberry Pi Foundation is another of its strong points, making it a good choice for newbies to the environment. All the latest information relating to this chip can be read and viewed in articles [1][2][3], a webinar [4] or videos [5] from Elektor.
The Raspberry Pi Pico board (Figure 1) contains just about the
minimum hardware necessary to support the RP2040 operation. On board is a user-controllable green LED and a DC/DC buck/boost converter to allow the board to be powered from an external 1.8 to 5.5 V source or via the 5 V from the USB port. The Raspberry Pi Pico is still one of the best boards in terms of price/performance ratio, especially if you just want some experience with the RP2040 and its development environment. Maybe you already have a collection of modules and external components/sensors you can interface with it. The board enjoys support from a number of books and there are many web resources to draw on for self-study. Additional hardware will be necessary if you plan to venture beyond the basics (see the Elektor Raspberry Pi Pico Experimenting Kit below). Without too much effort the Pico board can also function as a debugger for another RP2040. At €5 per unit, it is very affordable, and if you want a Pico with preinstalled pin headers together with a suitable micro USB cable (Figure 2), look no further than the Elektor Store, where you can also find some interesting expansion boards for the Raspberry Pi Pico there.
Figure 1: The Raspberry Pi Pico (Source: Raspberry Pi).
Figure 2: Raspberry Pi Pico with Headers (Source: Elektor).
The Raspberry Pi Pico — the manufacturer’s own board on which the RP2040 is installed — is equipped with minimal additional hardware to keep the price down to around €5 per board. One year on after its release, the RP2040 chip has found its way onto a number of third-party boards which have been equipped with a wide variety of peripherals. In this review we take a closer look at some of these other boards to help you to decide which of them fits your needs.
The Raspberry Pi Pico
28 embedded world Special 2022 www.elektormagazine.com
