There are 16 PWM channels, each pin has a channel it can be set to (ditto on the pinout). For many other computational tasks, you’ll get close-to-M4 speeds!įor peripherals, there are two I2C controllers, two SPI controllers, and two UARTs that are multiplexed across the GPIO - check the pinout for what pins can be set to which. 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.

The RP2040 is a powerful chip, which has the clock speed of our M4 (SAMD51), and two cores that are equivalent to our M0 (SAMD21). Just note you don’t double-click reset, instead hold down BOOTSEL during boot to enter the bootloader!

Folks who have been using Adafruit products will find this very familiar - we use the technique all our native-USB boards. 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. Inside the RP2040 is a ‘permanent ROM’ USB UF2 bootloader.

On the slim green board is minimal circuitry to get you going: A 5V to 3.3V power supply converter, single green LED on GP25, boot select button, RP2040 chip with dual-core Cortex M0, 2 MegaBytes of QSPI flash storage, and crystal. There are no true analog output (DAC) pins. All of the GPIO pins are 3.3V logic, and are not 5V-safe so stick to 3V! You get a total of 26 GPIO pins, 3 of those can be analog inputs (the chip has 4 ADC but one is not broken out). There’s 20 pads on each side, with groups of general purpose input-and-output (GPIO) pins interleaved with plenty of ground pins. The Pico is 0.825” x 2” and can have headers soldered in for use in a breadboard or perfboard, or can be soldered directly onto a PCB with the castellated pads. This low-cost microcontroller board features a powerful new chip, the RP2040, and all the fixin’s to get started with embedded electronics projects at a stress-free price. The Raspberry Pi foundation changed single-board computing when they released the Raspberry Pi computer, now they’re ready to do the same for microcontrollers with the release of the brand new Raspberry Pi Pico.

Free download raspberry pi pico pinout