Why You Need a Raspberry Pi Pico Development Board by Shabaz - Workbench Wednesdays 70

Very good review of a very useful product.

It looks like a great device for element 14 to offer as a kit!

I've tidied it up, but also decided to embrace that area beyond the frame..

All the prototyping area pads clutter is off the frame. It could move to a separate sheet, but I'll leave it there for now, it's still nicely out of the way and yet can be quickly zoomed/scrolled into view.

Close-up of the stuff that is beyond the frame!

The neat thing is that when plotting to PDF, just the important bit gets plotted!

I'll get the Kicad 7 project source into the GitHub site. There are lots of DRC warnings (all related to silkscreen cuts/overlaps or to the inverse text silkscreen, since that was just pasted in without a library) but those can be improved another day, since that could be quite tedious to fix each silkscreen issue. Also I have two weird errors where KiCad expects two footprints of type "Through-Hole" but sees "SMD". This might be a KiCad 7 error (I don't recall seeing it in KiCad 6 but I might be mistaken), but it seems benign, since this has not changed between revisions, and clearly the Rev 2.1 boards worked since they are tested physically. 

Ohhhh. I did not even make the connection (no pun intended) that they were consecutive! Damn. That's a good idea.

So yeah, I think if you removed the pin number silks, it wouldn't be so mind bending. (At least, for me.)

I forgot to mention, in your video you referred to the connections on the right side of the board, and their numbering. The numbering is just the 32-way connector, unfortunately it doesn't correspond to the pins as you say. Maybe I should get rid of that connector numbering off the silkscreen.

Anyway, the pins in that area are consecutive, in sections, which should be ideal for PIO projects since that prefers consecutive pins (although I've not used the PIO so far), so I'm hoping that ADCs/DACs etc are easy to hook up to that connector if desired. I've sketched the diag below to show the consecutive connections:

The oval silkscreen around those pins just indicates that they are I/O pins, and the little filled arrow on the oval indicates the direction of increasing GPIO value (since the ones in yellow in the diagram above go from IO16 to IO22 physically from the bottom-up, then the arrow for those points upwards.It's not a great labeling system, I was out of space there basically! : )

On second, arguably the first, thought, maybe PIO doesn't make sense in this case since it's basically a look-up table.

Very cool idea.

No driver IC? Hm. Sounds like a good PIO project!

This query pops up most of the e14 articles for the Eurocard: /tags/pico_5F00_eurocard

Thanks! Also I just wanted to mention, it was Jan's idea to include PicoProbe capability on the board when the Rev 1.0 board was published and I was looking for feedback. The Rev 1.0 board was already quite packed, but it seemed such an awesome idea I didn't want to discard it, so I hunted around and found the Xiao RP2040 existed, and it turned out to be ideal for this purpose! And then Jan came through with properly creating a project for the Xiao version PicoProbe, and a load of other blog posts, so along with your Workshop Wednesday's video too, this has all been a great community effort!

I built up these  Easy 7-Segment Displays  the other day. If they work I'll send them across to you and Jan soon (I want to create a plug-on protoboard with Mikrobus Click shield adapter since that seems handy). It's just a simple 7-seg display, just BJTs, and no driver chip, it relies on code to do the multiplexing effort, and it hangs off the 3x32-way connector area on the right side of the board.

Hehe glad it showed up, it's convenient having that for powering projects. That microscope gives very sharp images!

First, thanks again for sending the board. You did a fantastic job. And second, thanks for mentioning the link to Jan's work. (He posted that after I had submitted everything.)