It Might Not Be the Smallest RP2040 Board, But the Pimoroni PGA2040 Is a Pretty Good Attempt!

The hot new toy from the Raspberry Pi Foundation — the RP2040 dual-core Cortex M0+ MCU keeps on making waves.

With this new slice of silicon seemingly looking like one of the few parts you are likely to be able to lay your mitts upon this year — and perhaps even next?! — this dual-core debutante is growing more and more attractive by the minute!

With Eben himself offering a definite view to supporting the maker community, it is of no surprise to see a slew of projects that are promoting the very same MCU that can be found on the rediculously priced Raspberry Pi Pico board, amongst others.

With the Pico namesake obviously inspiring the thought process behind a number of derivative boards, including the nifty RP2040 stamp that we have only just covered, the minds behind the RP2040 Tiny over at Pimoroni have gone and double-tapped in their trials of small RP2040 daughter boards.

Presenting the PGA2040!

If you really are looking to jump to MVP, sometimes it's handy to have a little block of known good reference design to drop in place of what could otherwise be a possibly problematic bring up of an unknown new part for the first time.

We see this all the time, in boards of varying complexity — from Basic Stamp modules, up to high-end compute SoMs. Sometimes you just want to focus on the peripheral features of your board, and less with getting the processor booting.

No-frills feature set

Sporting only the bare necessities needed to boot up the RP2040, the RP2040 PGA packs the following:

• Powered by RP2040
• 8MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
• Crystal oscillator
• On-board 3V3 regulator (max regulator current output 300mA)
• 48 pins, arranged with 2.54mm (0.1") spacing in a pin grid array — 30 of which are multi-function GPIO (4 being ADC capable)

With a spartan schematic to show for itself, we can see that this really is a barebones design, intended to boost the speed of getting to blinky in your next RP2040 based board.

With little other to note beyond the RP2040 silicon itself, we can see the few other components that made the cut for the bill of materials shown below — an NCP115AMX330 3.3V LDO, and the 8MB of XiP capable FLASH memory — a W25Q64JVXGIQ.

With nary four parts that aren't classed as jellybean passives, it's no wonder that this gold-plated PGA-style SoM comes in at a pretty reasonable price (< 7 GBP)!

Making itself perfect for integration into a host board, the PGA lacks any buttons, LED's or USB connector, but can be wired up to an external USB breakout board for ease of prototyping!

And with Pimoroni staff already whipping up some nifty little creations around this tiny little board — we can see such fun applications waiting for the PGA2040 from designers such as Chris Parrott (@ZodiusInfuser on Twitter) as small, but capable robotics platforms — such as this three-wheeled omni-wheel rover, seen below.

Keeping in mind the 6mm² footprint of the RP2040, sitting within the 21mm² footprint of the PGA2040, we can see that this little rover is a great example of the tiny, but powerful projects this Pimoroni-branded PGA module will enable!

Check the product page from Pimoroni over here for the extra details — and to lay your hands on one of the PGA2040 modules for your own development purposes.