Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 19:40:42 GMT

The Pico Eurocard works perfectly for the Pico2 family too. No hardware changes needed.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:17:13 GMT

Here's a few photos of the Eurocard with the ST Micro Teseo GPS board.

This setup results in reliable connections. Angled headers allow to mount the board in an angle, a good position for a GPS device.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 16:07:22 GMT

I have an improvement request:

The 3V3 on the debug header, J6.P4, comes from "the device to be programmed".
Would this work better that 3v3 came from the XIAO pico-probe? From U3.P12?

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:19:00 GMT

a little addition that I find useful: the proto area has the right size to add one of those small [embed:ad4490ac-0ce8-4f2d-a04c-9285646d5689:f8aed2a3-aa99-49ba-99ac-f7337f3b4ef3:text=breadboards&style=link&farnell=2770327&newark=83AC8606&cpc=&avnetemea=&avnetema=&avnetasia=&comoverride=&cmpoverride=&AreaInteracted=rte-content&bom=]. They come with double-sided tape.

You can just stick one on. The white ones cost less than 0.5 £ / € / $ for a pair.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Workshopshed — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 05:19:40 GMT

A great project Shabaz

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 16:10:16 GMT

The Rapberry team has released a $12 debugger.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

shabaz — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 18:38:46 GMT

[mention:acaf6a9338de4eef8f6717d5561ed01d:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] kindly mapped out the default pin assignments on the board, and I've added them to a diagram in the main body of the blog post.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 15:00:43 GMT

The card routes / reserves some of the pins. Here's an overview of the pins that have a (by default) predefined function:

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:11:29 GMT

I'm going to test the SD Card. According to calk3 , it's best to pull up the SPI lines:

The SPI MISO (DO on SD card, SPIx RX on Pico) is open collector (or tristate). It should be pulled up. The Pico internal gpio_pull_up is weak: around 56uA or 60kΩ. It's best to add an external pull up resistor of around 5kΩ to 3.3v. You might get away without one if you only run one SD card and don't push the SPI baud rate too high.
The SPI Slave Select (SS), or Chip Select (CS) line enables one SPI slave of possibly multiple slaves on the bus. This is what enables the tristate buffer for Data Out (DO), among other things. It's best to pull CS up so that it doesn't float before the Pico GPIO is initialized. It is imperative to pull it up for any devices on the bus that aren't initialized. For example, if you have two SD cards on one bus but the firmware is aware of only one card (see hw_config); you can't let the CS float on the unused one.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

ntewinkel — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 22:19:24 GMT

This is really amazing, @shabaz! Thank you for sharing your designs [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 20:39:42 GMT

I just tested your rotary encoder with another nice PIO design: PIO Quadrature Encoder by Jamon Terrell.
I only had to set the two pins to the ones you use with the EuroCard: IO6 and IO7.

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

Jan Cumps — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 21:57:05 GMT

Action photo: preparing the dev board for CAN development:

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

shabaz — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 17:06:32 GMT

I've added revision 2.x to GitHub, and added the 2.x schematic to the above blog post, at the end.

Rev 2.x is (I feel) much better! I took user requests, and added built-in PicoProbe supports (thanks [mention:acaf6a9338de4eef8f6717d5561ed01d:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]) and added better 8-pin SOIC support for non-volatile RAM / FRAM or for an op-amp (thanks [mention:6f7924a04a1349b2ac17b4cde35daef5:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] ) and it also now has dual power output (5V _and_ 3.3V both at up to 500 mA) which is a lot more convenient for driving extra circuitry. Also there is a rotary encoder (thanks [mention:acaf6a9338de4eef8f6717d5561ed01d:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] and [mention:6f7924a04a1349b2ac17b4cde35daef5:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]) and microSD card socket.

Plus, things are cleaned up for far easier add-on of plug-on protoboard over the perfboard area, and also better use of the Eurocard connector area (3 x 32-pin).

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

shabaz — Wed, 04 May 2022 16:36:02 GMT

I've assembled up one of the boards, all ready for prototyping!

I modified this rev 1.0 board to rev 1.3 functionality, by soldering connections for TFT and LCD screens. I'm still waiting for a TFT screen to arrive.

It was a great suggestion to add the display capabilities! This particular LCD screen doesn't have great contrast, but is easy to control and has plenty of source code - it is a Waveshare display). It has a multi-color backlight which is unusual too.

The easiest way to use stripboard is shown on the left side in the photo above. The surface-mount sockets are easy to align while soldering, by pushing a row of pin headers in from the other side (the sockets accept pins from both directions. In theory this means you could use either side of the stripboard face up (e.g. for some surface-mount work, it's better for the traces to be face-up).

The latest rev 1.3 files simplify the addition of stripboard, by having a single long column of contacts, so that many separate ones are not needed.

The photo below shows what it looks like with stripboard added (the other side could be supported with more pins/sockets if desired). The blue row of sockets is for the TFT screen.

The wire mods to obtain the rev 1.3 functionality:

RE: Pi Pico Eurocard Development Board

shabaz — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 17:22:28 GMT

I've added Rev 1.2 to the GitHub link.

Rev 1.2 has these very small additions:

(a) - Added pads on the underside of the SOIC footprints, to be able to easily solder decoupling capacitors across popular pins. Also, added optional feedback component pads (if the SOIC=8 device happens to be an op amp). Usually they are awkward when prototyping because they straddle the op amp, so now that would be a bit easier to do on the underside of the board if desired.

(b) - Rounded the corners of the PCB very slightly (0.5mm radius). Previously, the corners had no radius.