Picade Max USB Audio

Connect a pair of small speakers up to a Raspberry Pi (or another computer) easily with this RP2040-powered USB-C sound card/3W stereo amplifier.

We made this RP2040 board to drive the speakers on Picade Max, but we thought it might also be useful for other builds where you want to connect some speakers up over USB-C – especially since 3.5mm audio jacks are now starting to become somewhat of a rarity!

There are two screw terminals to connect the wires from your speakers, you’ll need a 2mm or 2.5mm flat-blade screwdriver for this. Once it’s plugged into your computer, you may need to set this board as your default audio output device (in Raspberry Pi OS you can right-click on the speaker in the menu bar).

Click here to see our range of speakers.

Features

• Powered by RP2040
  • Dual ARM Cortex M0+ with 264kB of SRAM
  • 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
• 2 x screw terminals to attach speakers
• I2S audio DAC with 3W stereo amplifier
• Connector to add encoder for volume control
• USB-C Connector
• Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) Connector
• Status LED
• BOOT and RESET buttons
• Fully-assembled (no soldering required)

Resources

• Schematic
• C firmware