Makers Michael Rangen and Cody Jacob, teaming up as Breadstick Improvements, have designed a prolonged various to the favored Raspberry Pi Pico — taking over the complete peak of a solderless breadboard: the “lengthy, lean, scrumptious” Raspberry Breadstick.
“Whether or not your aim is to construct a robotic or an interactive artwork piece, you’ll start by prototyping with a microcontroller development-board and a breadboard,” the makers clarify. “Doing this with conventional dev-boards rapidly results in a tangled mess of jumper wires. The Raspberry Breadstick spreads its I/O [Input/Output] pins out alongside the size of the breadboard, eliminating the necessity for lengthy jumper wires, and delivers a clear prototyping expertise that’s simpler to grasp and troubleshoot.”
The Raspberry Breadstick provides an elongated tackle a Raspberry Pi RP2040 improvement board design. (📷: Breadstick Improvements)
Dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program, the Raspberry Breadstick incorporates a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller — which means two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores operating at a inventory 133MHz, 264kB of static RAM (SRAM), and intelligent Programmable Enter/Output (PIO) blocks which may run state machines independently of the CPU cores. To this, the makers have added 16MB of off-chip flash storage, a six-axis STMicroelectronics LSM6DSMTR inertial measurement unit (IMU), and no fewer than 24 individually-addressable RGB LEDs.
This is not the primary board to bear the “Bradstick” identify: two years in the past Rangen confirmed off the M4-Breadstick, taking the core design of the Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Categorical however elongated it to cowl all the peak of a solderless breadboard. The Raspberry Breadstick makes use of the identical core idea, however takes as its base the Raspberry Pi Pico as a substitute.
The machine takes up the complete peak of widespread solderless breadboards, aiming to simplify wiring. (📷: Breadstick Improvements)
On the software program entrance, the Raspberry Breadstick is appropriate with something that may run on an RP2040 — and whereas Rangen and Jacob are concentrating on its assist for MicroPython and CircuitPython meaning the official C/C++ software program improvement package (SDK) and the Arduino IDE are within the combine too. Energy and programming takes place over a USB Kind-C port on the prime of the board — able to negotiating as much as 5V 3A from USB Energy Supply (PD) succesful provides.
There’s solely actually one caveat within the design: solely 18 of the Raspberry Pi RP2040’s general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins are introduced out on the board, in comparison with 26 on the Raspberry Pi Pico.
The Raspberry Breadstick is now funding on Crowd Provide at $55 with free US delivery; the undertaking can be open supply, with {hardware} and software program sources revealed to GitHub below the permissive MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses respectively.