RP2040-PICO-PC small computer made with the Raspberry Pi RP2040-PICO module first prototypes are ready

These who follow our account in Twitter know our small teaser posted on March 1st.

It’s small base board for RP2040-PICO the $4 module with the Cortex-M0+ processor made by Raspberry Pi foundation.

We were ready with the prototype for a long time but the RP2040-PICO modules were tricky to source 🙂

Raspberry Pi suffer from the same problems the semiconductor industry have now – no enough components to organize production and the PICO modules are hard to obtain.

From the picture above you can see what our idea is:

• Small board taking power from the USB on the right just below the RP2040-PICO module.
• LiPo battery charged for handheld operation and power backup.
• Reset button.
• Micro SD card
• Audio output
• HDMI connector with DVI signals to connect to monitor
• UEXT connector with UART, SPI, I2C, 3.3V and GND to attach different sensors
• JST2.0 4 pin I2C + power supply connector
• Debug connector for Serial adapter

The price of RP2040-PICO-PC including the original RP2040-PICO module from Raspberry Pi with soldered headers all in one ready to use computer will cost EUR 12.00

As RP2040-PICO modules now are not available in production quantities for purchase, we decided that until we wait we could make our own version of RP2040-PICO, which to be pin to pin drop in replacement.

Fortunately some RP2040 processors are available now, so we can make our own DIL40 board, this is how our RP2040-Py board was born:

It’s mechanically same as size, with connector signals like the original RP2040-PICO.

Functionally RP2040-Py is same as RP2040-PICO, but has some imoprovements:

• RP2040 SOC
• 2MB of SPI Flash
• USB micro connector on the right hand
• Power supply DC-DC with 3.3V up to 2A (if the 5V source can provide)
• Reset and Boot buttons
• two 20 pin rows on the side with same signals making it drop pin to pin compatible.
• uUEXT connector on bottom

As the board still had plenty of not used space we decided to add USB JTAG debugger, which will allow you to debug your RP2040 SOC with step by step execution, to watch variables and set breakpoints while you develop your code.

There will be three versions of the RP2040-Py:

Basic: same as RP2040-PICO but with higher current DCDC power supply (3.3V up to 2A output) additional UEXT connector and RESET button. The price of this module will be EUR 5.00

Basic+ same as Basic but with soldered headers and additional left hand side micro USB, which can be used to power the board while the left hand side micro USB can be used as USB device or USB host. The price of this module will be EUR 8.00

Debug: same as Basic+ but with populated JTAG parts, which allow real time programming and debugging. The price of this module will be EUR 19.00 The JTAG debugger is tested to work with OpenOCD/Eclipse/Visual Studio, ARM (Keil) IDE and IAR Systems EW.