First Version

Published on 2022-08-25 in µGame 22.

I was working on this behind the scenes for a while, mostly because I didn’t have the energy to write the logs, and because the progress was really slow. It’s my first time using the RP2040 chip, so I wasn’t even sure it will work. But I did design the PCB, and when I ran out of excuses, ordered it together with the laser-cut acrylic parts from @Elecrow .

There isn’t really that much going on here. We have the RP2040 with all the required caps, resistors, crystals and flash memory, we have a magnetic speaker with a FET, power switch, seven buttons and a display. Very basic. Oh, and I used lead-free solder for the first time. It’s a bit annoying with how it doesn’t melt as well as the regular one, but it’s not too bad.

The first test of the RP2040 required a few passes with the hot air gun to get working. You can see I have wrong footprint for the crystal

• that’s the only kind I could get quickly. Next version will have the proper footprint. I have to say that having a UF2 bootloader built-in into the chip is super convenient, no need to flash anything with a programmer.

Oh, I forgot. There was a problem with the speaker. Since I added the FET at the last moment, I didn’t remove the ground seed from the pad, and as a result the pad was shorted to the ground. A few deft cuts fixed this. It will also be fixed in the next version.