mifune

Pim de Groot

@mifune

Making Stuff

log inask
Mastodon
mastodon.social/@mifune
Photo website
pimdegroot.org/photos
mifune
@mifune

My own RP2040 devboards

As might be obvious from previous posts I quite like the RP2040. The only downside is that the official dev board is the raspberry pico. It has an outdated USB micro connector, and is meant for breadboard use. Ive been using SMD components for at least 5 years now, and they are not exactly breadboard friendly. Just yolo-ing a pcb works better for me.

So I've designed my own devboards. It has a USB-C connector, a bunch of LEDs and a button, and place for three PMOD connectors. They are basically headers, but with a somewhat standard layout for power, ground, and GPIO.

I've made a similar board ages ago, but this one takes into account all the lessons of the badges. This made it easier to design and a bit cheaper. It's also a design I can re-use for other projects (for example, I still want to make a eurorack module with an RP2040).

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @mifune's post:

jamesmunns
@jamesmunns

These look super slick. I love the matte black.

If you end up doing audio/eurorack things with it, and are maybe interested in Rust, hit me up! I'm mostly looking for conspirators to help me stay excited/motivated about sticking to a given topic.

login to reply
dcoles
@dcoles

That's a really cool little form-factor. It's also really nice seeing a board that has a clean and easy-to-follow layout like this (something I also really liked about the original Arduino).

I recently picked up a QT Py RP2040 for some projects since it makes for a really fun little chip with some amazing hardware level documentation (I had some questions about the PICOBOOT interface and was quickly able to find not only the source code of the boot loader but also a clear step-by-step walk through of the process).

I'm now a little torn between ESP32, SAMD21 and the RP2040 as they all have great documentation, tooling and platform support for MicroPython/Arduino/C/C++/Rust.

login to reply
mifune
@mifune

In my experience the original ESP32 is very useful if WiFi is required, but having to use an uart-usb converter is not that great.

The samd21 has a good adc/dac and doesn’t need a lot of extra components. It also comes in relatively solder friendly packages. Getting a bootloader on there is a bit complicated though. During the chip shortage several models were unavailable.

The RP2040 has great documentation, and is designed for running micropython. It’s also cheaper than the samd21. It does require a crystal and external flash. The QFN package and recommended 0402 passives are not that fun to solder, though JLCPCB can do it for you.

That are basically the pros and cons that I encountered with these chips. They are all pretty much fine for general use, so it depends on specific use cases which you want to pick.

login to reply