Adafruit Feather RP2040

The Adafruit Feather PR2040 features the new Raspberry Pi RP2040 chipset. If you like the standard features of the Feather and want to try out the new Raspberry Pi RP2040 chipset – this is the board for you!

Onboard is the RP2040 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core running at ~125 MHz @ 3.3V logic and power and 264KB RAM. There is also 8MB SPI FLASH – plenty of room for your CircuitPython/MicroPython code. For connecting to your peripherals there are 21 multi-function GPIO pins with 4 being 12-bit ADCs, 2 x I2C interfaces, and 16 being PWM capable. There is also a Qwiic / Stemma QT connector, NeoPixel RGB LED, and Red LED on GPIO 13. To top it all off, it also has a LiPo battery charge circuit just like all Feathers before it.

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 the 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 – we use the technique on all our native-USB boards. Just note you don’t double-click reset, instead hold down BOOTSEL during boot to enter the bootloader!

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).

You’ll note there’s no I2S peripheral, or SDIO, or camera, what’s up with that? Well instead of having specific hardware support for serial-data-like peripherals like these, the RP2040 comes with the PIO state machine system which is a unique and powerful way to create custom hardware logic and data processing blocks that run on their own without taking up a CPU. For example, NeoPixels – often we bitbang the timing-specific protocol for these LEDs. For the RP2040, we instead use PIO object that reads in the data buffer and clocks out the right bitstream with perfect accuracy. Same with I2S audio in or out, LED matrix displays, 8-bit or SPI based TFTs, even VGA! In MicroPython and CircuitPython you can create PIO control commands to script the peripheral and load it in at runtime. There are 2 PIO peripherals with 4 state machines each.

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

Package Includes:

1 x Adafruit Feather RP2040