RP2040

Published on 2022-03-11 in Handheld Wing.

I didn’t really do much with this project for a year, but recently I wanted to order some more PewPew M4 boards for a workshop, and realized that with the current chip shortage, the SAMD51 chips I used are impossible to get. So I think I need to now make a version of PewPew M4 with the RP2040 chip on board. I already had one attempt at it, doing research for  PewPew S3 , but what I need now is not a bigger and better device, but exactly the same as PewPew M4, but with a chip that you can buy. So I dug out this project to try it with the RP2040 Feather, and see if there are any traps lurking for me.

In short, there don’t seem to be any. I added the missing resistors, plugged in the feather, wrote a ugame.py for it, and it just works.

However, the next step will be to design a PCB similar to that of PewPew M4, but with the RP2040 chip on it, and that is going to be some more work. You see, the SAMD51 only needed two capacitors and a resistor. The RP2040 needs that, plus a flash chip, a crystal oscillator with its own capacitors, and possibly more. So now I need to figure out what is needed exactly, and design the PCB for it.

Alternatively, I could simply use a Pi PIco, but that would mean I have to give up on he expansion header.