PicUNO: RP2040 in the Arduino Uno Form Factor

PicUNO (a portmanteau of Pico + UNO) is an RP2040 development board that merges the abilities of the Raspberry Pi Pico with the well-known form factor of the Arduino Uno. It also adds a few extras, like level-shifting and an addressable LED.

The PicUNO is the invention of Atul Ravi, who began experimenting with building his own RP2040-based board some time ago. He was nice enough to credit some of my work in his early tinkering, but instead of settling for merely blinking an LED he took it several steps further and created an RP2040 processor/Arduino UNO physical format board.

Ravi is certainly not the first person to apply the RP2040 to a non-Pico form factor (noted in this project blog page). However, he aims to set the PicUNO apart with a few key features.

First, this device is meant to be much less expensive than other RP2040 boards that cost multiples of the Pico itself, though it’s still in a pre-mass manufacturing state. To help take it to the next level, you can sign up to get notified when it’s available, or even apply as a tester on the project’s main page.

Beyond price, the device features 5V tolerant GPIO pins, with 4 GPIO pins level-shifted up to 5V. All of the RP2040’s GPIO pins are broken out, and there are dedicated buttons for both reset and bootselect. A QWIIC/Stemma QT port is included for interfacing, along with its USB-C port. It has 8MB of storage, and comes with an addressable “NeoPixel” LED for luminescent output capabilities.

More details and design files are found on GitHub, and a short demo clip can be seen in the video below.