Description
Inside the RP2040 is a 'permanent ROM' USB UF2 bootloader. What that means is when you want to program new firmware, you can hold down the BOOTSEL button while plugging it into USB (or pulling down the RUN/Reset pin to ground) and it will appear as a USB disk drive you can drag the firmware onto. Folks who have been using Adafruit products will find this very familiar – Adafruit uses the technique on all thier native-USB boards. Just note you don't double-click reset, instead hold down BOOTSEL during boot to enter the bootloader!
The RP2040 is a powerful chip, which has the clock speed of our M4 (SAMD51), and two cores that are equivalent to our M0 (SAMD21). Since it is an M0 chip, it does not have a floating point unit, or DSP hardware support – so if you're doing something with heavy floating-point math, it will be done in software and thus not as fast as an M4. For many other computational tasks, you'll get close-to-M4 speeds!
For peripherals, there are two I²C controllers, two SPI controllers, and two UARTs that are multiplexed across the GPIO – check the pinout for what pins can be set to which. There are 16 PWM channels, each pin has a channel it can be set to (ditto on the pinout).
Technical Specifications
- Measures 2.0 x 0.9 x 0.28' (50.8 x 22.8 x 7 mm) without headers soldered in
- Light as a (large?) feather – 5 grams
- RP2040 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core running at ~125 MHz @ 3.3 V logic and power
- 264 KB RAM
- 8 MB SPI FLASH chip for storing files and CircuitPython/MicroPython code storage. No EEPROM
- Tons of GPIO! 21 x GPIO pins with following capabilities:
- Four 12 bit ADCs (one more than Pico)
- Two I²C, Two SPI and two UART peripherals, one is labeled for the 'main' interface in standard Feather locations
- 16 x PWM outputs - for servos, LEDs, etc
- The 8 digital 'non-ADC/non-peripheral' GPIO are consecutive for maximum PIO compatibility
- Built in 200 mA+ lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
- Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
- RGB NeoPixel for full color indication.
- On-board STEMMA QT connector that lets you quickly connect any Qwiic, STEMMA QT or Grove I²C devices with no soldering!
- Both Reset button and Bootloader select button for quick restarts (no unplugging-replugging to relaunch code)
- 3.3 V Power/enable pin
- Optional SWD debug port can be soldered in for debug access
- 4 mounting holes
- 24 MHz crystal for perfect timing.
- 3.3 V regulator with 500mA peak current output
- USB Type C connector lets you access built-in ROM USB bootloader and serial port debugging
RP2040 Chip Features
- Dual ARM Cortex-M0+ @ 133 MHz
- 264 kB on-chip SRAM in six independent banks
- Support for up to 16 MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
- DMA controller
- Fully-connected AHB crossbar
- Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
- On-chip programmable LDO to generate core voltage
- 2 on-chip PLLs to generate USB and core clocks
- 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analog inputs
- Peripherals
- 2 UARTs
- 2 SPI controllers
- 2 I²C controllers
- 16 PWM channels
- USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
- 8 PIO state machines
Comes fully assembled and tested, with the UF2 USB bootloader. Adafruit also tosses in some header, so you can solder it in and plug it into a solderless breadboard.
