Breadstick Innovations Stretches the Raspberry Pi Pico to Fill a Breadboard — and Adds Bonuses

Makers Michael Rangen and Cody Jacob, teaming up as Breadstick Innovations, have designed a lengthy alternative to the popular Raspberry Pi Pico — taking up the full height of a solderless breadboard: the "long, lean, delicious" Raspberry Breadstick.

"Whether your goal is to build a robot or an interactive art piece, you’ll begin by prototyping with a microcontroller development-board and a breadboard," the makers explain. "Doing this with traditional dev-boards quickly leads to a tangled mess of jumper wires. The Raspberry Breadstick spreads its I/O [Input/Output] pins out along the length of the breadboard, eliminating the need for long jumper wires, and delivers a clean prototyping experience that is easier to understand and troubleshoot."

Brought to our attention by CNX Software, the Raspberry Breadstick features a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller — meaning two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at a stock 133MHz, 264kB of static RAM (SRAM), and clever Programmable Input/Output (PIO) blocks which can run state machines independently of the CPU cores. To this, the makers have added 16MB of off-chip flash storage, a six-axis STMicroelectronics LSM6DSMTR inertial measurement unit (IMU), and no fewer than 24 individually-addressable RGB LEDs.

This isn't the first board to bear the "Bradstick" name: two years ago Rangen showed off the M4-Breadstick, taking the core design of the Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express but elongated it to cover the entire height of a solderless breadboard. The Raspberry Breadstick uses the same core concept, but takes as its base the Raspberry Pi Pico instead.

On the software front, the Raspberry Breadstick is compatible with anything that can run on an RP2040 — and while Rangen and Jacob are concentrating on its support for MicroPython and CircuitPython that means the official C/C++ software development kit (SDK) and the Arduino IDE are in the mix too. Power and programming takes place over a USB Type-C port at the top of the board — capable of negotiating up to 5V 3A from USB Power Delivery (PD) capable supplies.

There's only really one caveat in the design: only 18 of the Raspberry Pi RP2040's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are brought out on the board, compared to 26 on the Raspberry Pi Pico.

The Raspberry Breadstick is now funding on Crowd Supply at $55 with free US shipping; the project is also open source, with hardware and software sources published to GitHub under the permissive MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses respectively.