Yet Another Adafruit QT Py with Raspberry Pi's RP2040 Chip!
Adafruit has announced the release of a small factor board designed to explore the capabilities of the RP2040 chip.
Apart from the Raspberry Pi Pico, we have seen the emergence of development boards powered by the famous Raspberry Pi's in-house silicon RP2040, including SparkFun's Thing Plus, MicroMod, and Adafruit's ItsyBitsy. The RP204 chip is designed to be a low-cost, high-performance microcontroller, taking advantage of onboard dual Cortex-M0+ cores running at 125MHz. Continuing the growth and meeting the demands of developers, Adafruit has unveiled a new addition to their long list of small form factor boards: the QT Py RP2040.
Adafruit has expanded its QT Py product list with the most awaited support for the RP2040 chip keeping all the functionality as the original QT Py. Those who have used or read about QT Py know that the most important feature of these boards is the STEMMA QT connector. With this connector, developers can quickly get started with the board and attach STEMMA QT sensors or accessories with no extra soldering involved.
The QT Py 2040 is conveniently powered via its USB Type-C connector. Other than the 264KB storage provided by the RP2040 chip, the board boasts an additional 8MB SPI flash to store project files. If you remember the SAM D21-based QT Py, the board had only 11 GPIO pins; however, this QT Py received an upgrade to 13 GPIO pins, which includes four 12-bit ADCs, two I2C ports, and most importantly, SPI and UART peripherals.
In terms of software, the QT Py RP2040 offers C/C++ support, an official MicroPython port, and a CircuitPython port, of course! Arduino has officially announced the support for the Arduino core port, which is expected to come to market in no time. However, as of launch, the board is not compatible with the Arduino core.
The QT Py RP2040 is priced at $9.95, but is currently out of stock. Despite this, you can sign up to the mailing list on the product page to get notified when it becomes available.