Since its debut the RP2040 chip has seen a steady increase in usage but often people’s first experience with this chip is on the official Raspberry Pi Pico board. It’s an excellent board but it’s good to see more choice of platform for any chip. This Micro RP2040 board from SB Components is functionally very similar to the Pico but has a few other attractive features!
First of all — the clue is in the name — it’s small! Whilst the product listing doesn’t actually specify the dimensions, counting up the 2.54mm pitch pin headers leads us to guess it’s around 24mm * 24mm. This is less than half the size of the Pico and certainly should be able to find a home in the smallest of projects. Another difference from the Pico is that the Micro RP2040 has USB-C, which is excellent — no more fumbling to get the cable the correct way around! It has slightly fewer GPIO than a full-size Pico. There are 23 GPIO pins broken out as opposed to 30 on the Pico, which is still plenty for most projects. The RP2040 is a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of Flash — more than enough for just about any project you can imagine!
The board has through-hole pads that are also castellated, meaning that the Micro RP2040 can be surface mounted onto a PCB, even when hand soldering! It’s a very affordable board and, although there are now lots of options for RP2040 modules, this board is a handy solution for those projects short on space!
