Raspberry Pi RP2040 Core on Arduino, Adafruit Boards Among Others

When Raspberry Pi launched their first ever microcontroller in the form of Raspberry Pi PICO with a RP2040 core, they ushered in a new era of microcontrollers. The RP2040 core is now becoming the first choice for other microcontroller board developers like Arduino, Pimoroni, Sparkfun and Adafruit. All are in the phase of developing new boards with this core.

Arduino officially announced that they will be using this RP2040 core to develop a new Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, which will be featuring this core. This came on the heels of the Raspberry Pi PICO launching yesterday. The microcontroller being two ARM Cortex M0+ cores, will definitely have more boards in the future with this.

"We are going to port the Arduino core to this new architecture in order to enable everyone to use the RP2040 chip with the Arduino ecosystem," a joint statement from Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante explains. "IDE, command line tool, and thousands of libraries."

Adafruit is also coming up with their Adafruit Feather RP 2040 board with a USB-C port, LiPo battery charging support, 4MB of QSPI flash, a STEMMA QT I2C connector, and an optional SWD debug port. 

Adafruit even made another board with the smaller ItsyBitsy RP 2040, also equipped with 4MB of QSPI flash, plus boot and reset buttons and an RGB NeoPixel LED.

Similarly, Sparkfun and Pimoroni are developing three new boards with RP2040 core respectively.

Unfortunately, we do not have the launch date for any of the boards mentioned above yet. But we'll update you as soon as we do.