Raspberry Pi Pico: Transform the new single-board computer into an expanded development board with the Kiwikit
The Raspberry Pi Foundation only announced the Raspberry Pi Pico a month ago, but someone has already created an expanded development board for it. Developed by Hammond Pearce, the Kiwikit provides physical connections that the Pico lacks, which should be useful when creating projects using the US$4 microcontroller.
According to Pearce, the Kiwikit includes the following features:
- Three general purpose buttons
- Reset button
- Two general-purpose LEDs
- Power LED
- I2C SSD1306 display
- I2C AT24 EEPROM
- LDR for analogue experimentation
Pearce designed the Kiwikit in KiCAD and had JLCPCB manufacture it, but he has no plans to mass-produce the development board. Instead, Pearce has published the PCB files on GitHub, should you wish to have one produced. Accordingly, Pearce has uploaded schematics too, which you can find here.
As for the Pico itself, the Pi Foundation has included a custom RP2040 microcontroller, a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, 264 KB of RAM and 2 MB of flash storage. There is also a micro USB 1.1 port, 26 GPIO and a temperature sensor, among other features.
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