Nicolò Carandini's 3D Model Brings an Accurate Raspberry Pi Pico Board to Your KiCad Projects
Designed to make previewing project designs more accurate, the free 3D model offers a full overview of the Raspberry Pi Pico board.
Anyone developing KiCad projects around the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller has a new tool to add to their arsenal, courtesy of Nicolò Carandini: a detailed 3D footprint of the microcontroller board, ready to add to your parts library.
Launched late last month, the Raspberry Pi Pico — the first microcontroller board from Raspberry Pi, and the first outing for its in-house RP2040 silicon — has proven popular for everything from beginner's projects to serving as a module to drive custom PCBs. For those working on the latter, Nicolò Carandini offers a boon: a detailed 3D model of the board.
"I've started from the schematics and footprint files available on the HeadBoffin RP_Silicon_KiCad GitHub project," Carandini explains. "[Alas], with the files found in the HeadBoffin project no visual footprint is available. So I decided to create one, using the mechanical specification from the Raspberry Pi Pico datasheet."
Designed in SketchUp and exported to a VRML file, the resulting model offers an accurate visual representation of the Raspberry Pi Pico within the KiCad 3D viewer — complete with the castellated pins which allow it to be used standalone, on a breadboard, or soldered down as a module.
"Please note that adding the visual file to the footprint make the use of KiCad very slow when showing the 3D viewer for the first time," Carandini warns. "On my old laptop it takes 30s to show, but only 3s to reopen it. The good news are that you can disable it while working at your project and enable it when you want a nice 3D representation of your work."
The model, with instructions on using it in KiCad, has been published to GitHub under the permissive TPCWare KiCad Library License.