Maker Pi RP2040

The Maker Pi RP2040 features the first microcontroller designed by Raspberry Pi – the RP2040 – embedded on a robot controller board!

The board comes with a 2-channel DC motor driver, 4 servo motor ports and 7 Grove I/O connectors ready for your next DIY robot/motion control project. Now you can build a robot while trying out the new RP2040 chip, all in one neat, affordable package with mounting holes and lots of handy features.

Maker Pi RP2040 features all the goodness of Cytron’s ‘Maker’ series of products. It has lots of LEDs for troubleshooting (& visual effects), and is able to make quite some noise with the onboard piezo buzzer! It also features push buttons ready to detect your touch.

New! You can now add WiFi connectivity to your Maker Pi Pico with the optional Grove WiFi 8299 IoT add-on!

Micro-USB cable not included (available here)

Motor Control

The DC motor driver on board is able to control two brushed DC motors or a single bipolar/unipolar stepper motor from 3.6V to 6V, providing up to 1A current per channel continuously. The built-in Quick Test buttons and motor output LEDs allow a functional test of the motor driver in a quick and convenient way without the need of writing any test code (Vmotor for both DC and servo motors depends on the input voltage supplied to the board).

Power

There are three ways to supply power to the Maker Pi RP2040 – via USB (5V) socket, with a single cell LiPo/Li-Ion battery or through the VIN (3.6-6V) terminals. However, only one power source is required to power up both the controller board and motors at a time. Power supply from all these power sources can all be controlled with the power on/off switch onboard.

Pico-Compatible + CircuityPython!

Cytron Maker Pi RP2040 is essentially the Raspberry Pi Pico + ‘Maker series’ goodness + Robot controller & other useful features. Therefore this board is compatible with the existing Pico ecosystem. Software, firmware, libraries and resources that are developed for Pico should work seamlessly with Cytron Maker Pi RP2040 too.

CircuitPython is preloaded on the Maker Pi RP2040 and it runs a simple demo program right out of the box. Connect it to your computer via USB micro cable and turn it on, you will be greeted by a melody tune and LEDs running light. Press GP20 and GP21 push buttons to toggle the LEDs on/off, while controlling any DC and servo motors connected to it to move and stop. With this demo code, you get to test the board the moment you receive it!

While connected to your computer, a new CIRCUITPY drive appears. Explore and edit the demo code (code.py & lib folder) with any code editor you like, save any changes to the drive and you shall see it in action in no time. That’s CircuitPython – very easy to get started. Wish to use other programming languages? Sure, you are free to use MicroPython and C/C++ for Pico/RP2040. For those of you who love the Arduino ecosystem, please take a look at this official news by Arduino and also the unofficial Pico Arduino Core by Earle F. Philhower.

Features

• Powered by the Raspberry Pi RP2040
  • Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor
  • 264KB internal RAM
  • 2MB of Flash memory
  • The exact same specifications with Raspberry Pi Pico
• Robot controller board
  • 4x Servo motors
  • 2x DC motors with quick test buttons
• Versatile power circuit
  • 7 Automatic power selection: USB 5V, LiPo (1-cell) or Vin (3.6-6V)
  • Built-in 1-cell LiPo/Li-Ion charger (over-charged & over-discharged protection)
  • Power on/off switch
• 13x Status indicator LEDs for GPIO pins
• 1x Piezo buzzer with mute switch
• 2x Pushbutton
• 2x RGB LED (Neopixel)
• 7x Grove ports (flexible I/O options: digital, analog, I2C, SPI, UART…)
• Preloaded with CircuitPython out-of-the-box
• Mounting holes
  • 4x 4.8mm mounting hole (LEGO® pin-compatible)
  • 6x M3 screw hole
• Dimension: 88mm(L) x 64mm(W) x 13mm(H)

Board Layout

Packing List

• 1x Maker Pi RP2040
• 4x Grove to Female Header Cable
• 1x Mini Screwdriver
• 1x Silicone Rubber Feet (Pack of 4)

Resources

• Getting Started with Maker Pi RP2040 & Example Code
• Maker Pi RP2040 Datasheet
• CircuitPython for Raspberry Pi Pico
• Getting Started with RP2040 (Raspberry Pi official page)
• RP2040 Datasheet