Waveshare has introduced the launch of an ultra-compact microcontroller board constructed across the Raspberry Pi RP2040, which achieves an impressively small footprint with out sacrificing usability — by shifting buttons and the USB Sort-C connector to a detachable daughterboard.
The Waveshare RP2040-Tiny growth board, delivered to our consideration by CNX Software program, delivers on the promise of its title: the machine measures simply 18×23.5mm (round 0.71×0.93″), but it contains the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ cores working at 133MHz, 264kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 2MB of off-chip flash storage — and contains 20 general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins round three of its edges.
Waveshare’s newest RP2040-based growth board achieves impressively compact dimensions — with a little bit trick. (📷: Waveshare)
The key to its dimension is that it lacks each reset and boot-selection buttons, and has no USB connector for energy and programming — all nice-to-have options throughout a challenge’s growth course of however which might be sacrificed at deployment to scale back the general footprint. With that in thoughts, the fourth fringe of the RP2040-Tiny features a flat versatile circuit (FFC) cable connector to be used with an non-obligatory daughterboard.
The daughterboard is the place you will discover the lacking buttons and a USB Sort-C connector. The concept is straightforward: use each boards collectively throughout growth to make it simpler to program the microcontroller and iterate the firmware, then whenever you’re able to deploy you may lose the daughterboard and energy the principle board by way of certainly one of its pins.
The board contains 20 user-accessible GPIO pins, together with all ADC and PWM channels, and its personal addressable LED. (📷: Waveshare)
Regardless of its small dimension, the RP2040-Tiny contains all the most important and finest options of the RP2040 — together with entry to all 4 analog-to-digital converter (ADC) pins, 16 pulse-width modulation (PWM) channels, two SPI, two I2C, and two UART buses, plus the on-board clock and temperature sensor, and even finds room for a user-addressable RGB LED. The 2 Programmable Enter/Output (PIO) blocks, which allow you to run state machines individually to the 2 Arm cores, are additionally current and proper.
The RP2040-Tiny is now obtainable on the Waveshare retailer for $4.49 earlier than quantity reductions; including the USB daughterboard and FFC cable will increase the value to $4.99.