VCC Labs' Nova Is a Compact, Breadboard-Friendly 70-LED Matrix Board Powered by Raspberry Pi RP2040

VCC Labs is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a compact RGB LED matrix, designed to put programmable color in the smallest of spaces thanks to its on-board Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller: the Nova.

"I’m excited to share my latest project: a tiny, open source [Raspberry Pi] RP2040-based board with an integrated addressable LED matrix," VCC Labs' pseudonymous spokesperson "TheBusDriver69" says of the breadboard-friendly development board. "It's built on a four-layer PCB, and the LEDs are ultra-small (just 1×1mm [around 0.04"] each), using WS2812 for full addressability."

The compact development board is powered by Raspberry Pi's dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ RP2040 microcontroller, which is found on the back side of the board — making room for a front festooned with 70 WS2812 addressable RGB LEDs, arranged in a 7x10 matrix. Unused general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are brought out to breadboard-friendly 0.1" pin headers at either side, with a USB Type-C connector for power and data.

VCC Labs promises that the board will be open source — though, at the time of writing, had not disclosed license details nor released any design files or schematics — and supported by the usual RP2040-compatible programming environments and languages, including the Arduino IDE and MicroPython.

The company is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in the near future, with interested parties invited to sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live.