Seeed Studio Launched Yet Another Tiny Board Featuring RP2040

A month back, Seeed Studio dropped a spoiler on LinkedIn regarding their plan to launch yet another product for its XIAO series featuring Raspberry Pi’s first in-house silicon tape out RP2040 SoC. A couple of years back, Seeed Studio released its hardware in the XIAO series with one SAMD21 Cortex M0+ processor for just $5.40. Just with the same form factor as the predecessor, XIAO RP2040 comes with a wide range of interfaces, excellent for wearable devices.

At the heart of the hardware development platform, XIAO RP2040 is the powerful 133MHz clocked dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor with on-chip 264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of flash memory. With RP2040 SoC, the hardware comes with the support of MicroPython, Arduino, and CircuitPython making it easy to use.

Beyond the famous RP2040, SoC comes a wide range of interfaces including I2C, UART, and SPI, and enough GPIO pins giving out 11 digital pins, 4 analogue pins, and 11 PWM pins. It also supports a USB Type-C interface, which is used to power the hardware and burn the code. With the compact form factor, the XIAO RP2040 board also comes with a reset button, BOOT button, user-programmable RGB LED, power LED, status indicators, and a user LED.

“The XIAO RP2040 is very compact because all electronic components are soldered on the same board surface, which means you can easily solder the XIAO RP2040 to your own PCB,”

explains the manufacturer.

XIAO RP2040 is pin-compatible with Seeeduino XIAO, so XIAO RP2040 can be learned and developed using the Expansion board of Seeeduino XIAO.

Because it uses the RP2040 chip, it supports C/C++ and MicroPython for you to code n’ play with the hardware. One of my personal favorite IDE is the Thonny editor, which can be used to burn the code on the XIAO RP2040 board. When compared to the predecessor Seeeduino XIAO, this board turns out to be a good choice because of the powerful chip but it is important to note that XIAO RP2040 does not come with a DAC output.

For all interested folks, schematics for the hardware are available to download and design your own similar board.

If you plan to play with this tiny board and compare it with other small factor RP2040 boards like QT Py 2040, then you can place a pre-order for $5.40 with an expected shipping date from August 31, 2021.

Update 01/01/2022

To support and inspire more XIAO RP2040 projects, Seeed is now offering 2 FREE PCBA prototypes with the Seeed Fusion PCBA service. All you need to do is to share your XIAO RP2040 powered custom design with Seeed Fusion, and they can help you make it a reality with their Fusion one-stop turnkey PCB Assembly service.

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