Joining the new Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller are a number of new boards created by the likes of Adafruit and the official Arduino team. Check out the video below to learn more about the new Adafruit Feather boards created using the new RP2040 chip, designed in the house by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
“Inside the RP2040 is a ‘permanent ROM’ USB UF2 bootloader. What that means is when you want to program new firmware, you can hold down the BOOTSEL button while plugging it into USB (or pulling down the RUN/Reset pin to ground) and it will appear as a USB disk drive you can drag the firmware onto. Folks who have been using Adafruit products will find this very familiar – we use the technique on all our native-USB boards. Just note you don’t double-click reset, instead hold down BOOTSEL during boot to enter the bootloader!
The RP2040 is a powerful chip, which has the clock speed of our M4 (SAMD51), and two cores that are equivalent to our M0 (SAMD1). Since it is an M0 chip, it does not have a floating point unit, or DSP hardware support – so if you’re doing something with heavy floating-point math, it will be done in software and thus not as fast as an M4. For many other computational tasks, you’ll get close-to-M4 speeds!”
“A new chip means a new Feather, and the Raspberry Pi RP2040 is no exception. When we saw this chip we thought “this chip is going to be awesome when we give it the Feather Treatment” and so we did! This Feather features the RP2040, and all niceties you know and love about Feather”
- Measures 2.0″ x 0.9″ x 0.28″ (50.8mm x 22.8mm x 7mm) without headers soldered in
- Light as a (large?) feather – 5 grams
- RP2040 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core running at ~125 MHz @ 3.3V logic and power
- 264 KB RAM
- 4 MB SPI FLASH chip for storing files and CircuitPython/MicroPython code storage. No EEPROM
- Tons of GPIO! 21 x GPIO pins with following capabilities:
- Four 12 bit ADCs (one more than Pico)
- Two I2C, Two SPI and two UART peripherals, we label one for the ‘main’ interface in standard Feather locations
- 16 x PWM outputs – for servos, LEDs, etc
- The 8 digital ‘non-ADC/non-peripheral’ GPIO are consecutive for maximum PIO compatibility
- Built in 200mA lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
- Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
- RGB NeoPixel with power pin on GPIO so you can depower it for low power usages.
- On-board STEMMA QT connector that lets you quickly connect any Qwiic, STEMMA QT or Grove I2C devices with no soldering!
- Both Reset button and Bootloader select button for quick restarts (no unplugging-replugging to relaunch code)
- 3.3V Power/enable pin
- Optional SWD debug port can be soldered in for debug access
- 4 mounting holes
- 24 MHz crystal for perfect timing.
- 3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output
- USB Type C connector lets you access built-in ROM USB bootloader and serial port debugging
Source : Adafruit : Arduino : Raspberry Pi
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