While the news-breaking launch of the Raspberry Pi Pico is still fresh in our minds, here is another launch of a tiny but powerful development board in the world of microcontroller boards on the footprint of Raspberry Pi Pico from Arduino officials.

Arduino named it Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect a newly launched Microcontroller board welcoming the Raspberry Pis RP2040chip on which NANO connect has been built. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect shares a similar form factor to the Raspberry Pi Pico, but it includes extra functionality, chiefly WiFi and Bluetooth along with a 9-axis IMU sensor and microphone.

Arduino also broke the news that they will be porting the Arduino IDE for use with the RP2040 chip. This is welcome news for C/C++ developers and embedded hobbyists alike.

Features and Specifications:

Raspberry Pi RP2040 Microcontroller:

1. 133MHz 32bit Dual Core Arm Cortex-M0+
2. 264kB on-chip SRAM
3. Direct Memory Access (DMA) controller
4. Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
5. USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
6. 8 PIO state machines
7. Programmable IO (PIO) for extended peripheral support
8. 4 channel ADC with internal temperature sensor, 0.5 MS a/s, 12-bit conversion
9. SWD Debugging
10. 2 on-chip PLLs to generate USB and core clock
11. 40nm process node
12. Multiple low power mode support
13. USB 1.1 Host/Device
14. Internal Voltage Regulator to supply the core voltage
15. Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB)/Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)

U-blox Nina W102 WiFi/Bluetooth Module:

1. 240MHz 32bit Dual Core Xtensa LX6
2. 520kB on-chip SRAM
3. 448 Kbyte ROM for booting and core functions
4. 16 Mbit FLASH for code storage including hardware encryption to protect programs
   and data
5. 1 kbit EFUSE (non-erasable memory) for MAC addresses, module configuration,
6. Flash-Encryption, and Chip-ID
7. IEEE 802.11b/g/n single-band 2.4 GHz WiFi operation
8. Bluetooth 4.2
9. Integrated Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA)
10. 4x 12-bit ADC
11. 3x I2C, SDIO, CAN, QSPI

Memory:

1. AT25SF128A 16MB NOR Flash
2. QSPI data transfer rate up to 532Mbps
3. 100K program/erase cycles

Package Includes:

1 x Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect without Header