November 13, 2023

The Maker Pi RP2040

I ordered one of these from DigiKey for $12. It is made by Cytron. It was sort of an impulse buy when I was buying 95 cents of surface mount resistors and wanting something else to go with the $7 postal charges. I received it 11-12-2023.

Like the Pi Pico, this is based on the RP2040 chip. The chip on my board is labeled RP2-B2.

Adafruit describes it as a robot controller board. It has a 2 channel motor driver, 4 servo motor ports, and 7 Grove IO connectors.
You get plenty of buttons and lots of LEDs, including two Neopixels.

A bonus in the box is a little screwdriver and four Grove connectors with pigtails.

It has a connector for a LiPo battery along with charging circuitry. It comes with Circuit Python preloaded and a demo ready to run.

You get 2M of flash and the usual 264K of internal ram, exactly like a Pi Pico.

The schematic shows the flash to be an 8 pin part, W25Q16JVUXIQ.
The motor driver is an MX1508 according to the schematic, but my board has an MX1515. The datasheet for this part is in Chinese. The maker is Sinotec Mixic Electronics.

Plug it in!

I plug it in. There is a switch next to the USB connector for on/off, this actually controls power from USB. When I turn it on, it plays a little tune, and performs a little light show.

It also presents itself as a USB memory device "CIRCUITPY" with "code.py" as well as other things. The file "code.py" is what runs the little demo.

Not bad for $12.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org