New Product Preview: RP2040-PICO30 Raspberry Pico with 30 GPIO available!

RP2040 is a nice dual-core Cortex-M0 SOC packed with a lot of features and a huge community that has been built up over the last two years since its announcement.

For our new Neo6502 design, we needed to use all 30 GPIOs on the RP2040. Although the RP2040 has 30 GPIOs, only 26 of them are available for the user, as GPIO23 controls the power supply, GPIO24 detects if USB is connected, GPIO25 is connected to the status LED, and GPIO29 measures the power supply after the 3.3V voltage regulator. While all these features are nice to have, there are many situations when you need to use ALL available GPIOs.

This is why we decided to release the RP2040-PICO30, where all 30 GPIOs are available for the user. We tried to be as compatible as possible with the RP2040-PICO layout, so we kept all signals in the same places and just removed 4 GNDs (as there are plenty in the RP2040-PICO) and connected the missing 4 GPIOs there.

Here is RP2040-PICO30 pinout:

In addition, we changed the USB micro connector used in the RP2040-PICO (as it can’t supply more than 0.5A by design) to USB-C, where up to 3A can be sourced. We also replaced the voltage regulator used in the RP2040-PICO with the proven SY8089A DCDC, which can deliver up to 3A at 3.3V.

RP2040-PICO30 has two buttons: RESET and BOOT and there is also status LED but it’s not connected by default to GPIO25 and require small solder jumper to be soldered if you want to use the LED. Of course we also add UEXT connector so our UEXT modules can be used with it.

This board is currently in the prototype stage and will be available for sale in late May. The price of the RP2040-PICO30 with 2MB Flash will be EUR 4.50. If you want the headers to be soldered onto it, the price will be EUR 6.00.

There will also be a version with 16MB Flash, and the price of the RP2040-PICO30-16MB will be EUR 6.50 without soldered headers and EUR 8.00 with soldered headers on it.