 The Great Search brought to you by did you key native fruit every single week? Later use of power of engineering help you yes you find the part that you need. Or in this particular case, in this particular week, one of the keystone, could I say keystone? Keystone. Fundamental? Yeah. It is a fundamental force of nature now because we've been able to do so much with a chip. We were thinking, did we do a Great Search with RV24? Turns out we didn't. Now, no time like the present. Okay. This is going to be overhead real fast. I'll just show off like a board I've been working on. So doing a lot of board designs and a lot of them are featuring the RP2040. We talked about this chip a lot, but maybe you got to this video from Google and you're like, what is this chip and where can I get it? So this is a microcontroller that does need a couple of accessories with it like it needs a Q-Spy flash and you'll want a USB port to go with it and a crystal and a lot of capacitors and then a boot button and a reset button. But other than that, it's a very well integrated chip that has a microcontroller core. It's got a dual Cortex M0 running at about 133 megahertz, but like you can really overclock it to like 250 if you feel like it and we do that all the time. It's got four analog inputs, which is great. It has two PIO machines which allow you to control more complicated devices that aren't just iSquared CSPI. It's got iSquared CSPI and you are built in two of each, but like you want to drive NeoPixels or maybe you want to like BitBang DVI or USB host or you want to do I2S, all these things you would control with the PIO machines inside the RP2040. That's kind of their innovation. It's very cool and XP also has this thing called FlexIO. But basically, a lot of times engineers have to BitBang with a microcontroller and it has like auto BitBanging devices. Super neat. There's also PWM outputs and lots of timers. So it's a really cute microcontroller and it's very inexpensive. Do note that of course you have to add an external flash chip which will add 50 cents and a crystal and that's gonna be another 20 cents or so. USB maybe another 10, 20 cents. So a total bill of materials costs about a buck but you get 256K of RAM in that, sorry, 264K of RAM with that which is a lot and a lot of my controllers in this price range do not come with more than eight or 16. So it's even though it's not a very powerful core, it's only a Cortex M0, not an M33 or M4, you get a lot of RAM and a lot of flash in exchange and so, you know, these powerful peripherals that may make up for the fact that it's not like a super ultra hyperpowered, you know, Cortex M7 or something. Okay, and then it's good on my computer and the reason we were on this topic was that MicroPython is one of the recommended programming languages. The RP2040 was designed to be very easy to integrate and then also easy to run. You can run Arduino on it, you can run PicoSDK which is CMake CC++. There's also I think Rust ported to it as probably Golang, Lisp, a lot of other languages. It's, you know, because it's ARM Cortex, a lot of stuff is gonna compile very cleanly to this core as long as you just have the peripherals you need to get your work done. So good news, if you're like, wow, I want this chip. Is this affected by the silicon shortage? Actually, it kind of never was. It was available all through the last two years which made it one of our favorites for redesigns. You guys have one of that, I'll say a little bit more boring great searches because you just searched for RP2040 and there is like a whole bunch of stuff. The key thing you may want is the RP2040 chip itself which is available under SC0914 but you just Google for RP2040 and the chip is right here. The price was originally a dollar a piece but thanks to good price competition it's now available at 70 cents a piece. What a good deal, 70 cents is pretty amazing. Usually that's what you would get for an 8-bit microcontroller at like an 8051 core but here you're getting a dual Cortex M0 with a ton of RAM. However, if you're gonna use this I will say you might wanna check out, first off they have great documentation but we also have, if you want like a ready to go I don't even wanna look at schematics. We've got a whole bunch of RP2040 feather boards that you can use as your basis. They're all openly licensed. We've got like the feather RP2040 which we published basically when the feather with the RP2040 came out. It looks like this. You can do, it kind of has a little bit of everything it has like a NeoPixel and battery backup and STEMIQT and boot switch and flash memory. So if you wanna just kind of use this as your basis to make sure there's a lot of little power supply things you just wanna make sure you get right you can use this Eagle CAD file and of course you can import that into PyCAD. We have many, many more boards as well. So like this RFM board and this DVI output board if you want DVI output. The other option is though and one thing that Raspberry Pi kind of they like to make interesting decisions is that they also have the Pico boards and let's see these probably under a valve boards. So there's a few like, you know, Wiznet makes a couple, there's a few like compatibles but the original is like the RP2040 Pico. And what's interesting about this is it comes with these cast-related pads which make it very easy for it to be pick and placed or hand placed onto a PCB and then solder directly onto the circuit board. And there are people who do this because once in a while you're like I don't want to have all the components and I wanna like do the arrangement. I just want to like place this on a board and I'm ready to go. I can move on to the Russian design. So this is actually available in cut tape and tape and reel. So you can get a reel of 480 and actually when we get them to sell in the Adafruit shop they come on a big reel and we have to cut them out. So you could send this to a board manufacturer and have them pick and place it onto your design. There's a couple of pads that are on the bottom. You'll, you know, there's on the bottom, there's pads. See if it's documented here. Let's see, this is the pin out. So yeah, so this is the mechanical layout and on the bottom there are these test pads and these test pads are the boot pin because that's not exposed. And I think, yeah, the USB minus and plus and so if you want to have an external separate USB connector elsewhere, you out them out. The LED in case you want to have the LED indicator be also available somehow in the boot select pin and that's how you enter into boot loader mode. So those are not brought out on the cast-related pads. They're brought out only on the test points. There's these test points here. This is the USB test points and these are the LED and boot test points. There's also three cast-related pads here for SWD for debugging and in-circuit programming. But you may be like, ah, you know, I don't want to solder it directly on. Well, there's also the Pico H and the Pico H is a little bit of a hack because it's like, why is this such a long thin board? So this board on the bottom it has this like structure with all the pins brought out so you don't get the test pads, right? So you're not going to get the boot select and D plus, D minus, but this is something where you don't have to solder it directly on and you can plug it in. And if you're like, well, what's an easy way to have this plug in? This is the same as a 40-pin point six inch sockets. Sorry, which are called an IC socket. So the two by 20, I'm sure there's more than these but these are some like really quick ones. You can get an IC socket and have this plug in. So instead of, you know, cause you're like, well, I don't want if I don't want to permanently solder it in, why would I get it with pins? You can get a socket and then have it plug in directly that way. So it's removable in case like you want to update to like a Pico W which they have with wireless or if the Pico gets damaged. So a couple options for you for manufacturing but still my pick of the week is the RP2040 chip, just the chip itself. What a good deal, 70 cents. And they've got 85,000 available at Digikey. How can you say no? Where in the world is that part I need? The great search with Digikey.