“The Little Guy” dev kit by Creature Co is a small animated companion. It’s made with an Adafruit Feather TFT ESP32-S3 board, a small LiPo battery and a custom case.
It’s customizable with the included Lark software.
The initial run of 100 has apparently sold out but there is a waitlist for additional units.
You can find out more on the website. Via X.
Raspberry Pi Pico 2W is Raspberry Pi Foundation’s update to their popular RP2040-based wireless ico board, now built on RP2350: their new high-performance, secure microcontroller. With a higher core clock speed, double the on-chip SRAM (512KB), double the on-board flash memory (4MB!), more powerful Arm M33 cores, new security and low-power features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature boost while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Raspberry Pi Pico series.
This version is ready to plug into a breadboard or socket, with pre-soldered headers!
Raspberry Pi Pico 2W is just like the Pico 2W but adds pre-soldered headers and a 3-pin debug connector. Raspberry Pi Pico 2W brings WiFi + BLE wireless networking to the Pico 2 platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling. It adds on-board single-band 2.4GHz wireless interfaces (802.11n) using the Infineon CYW43439 while retaining the Pico form factor. The on-board 2.4GHz wireless interface has the following features:
Due to pin limitations (the Pico2 brings out all the GPIO) some of the wireless interface pins are shared with the exposed pads:
For best wireless performance, the antenna should be in free space. For instance, putting metal under or close by the antenna can reduce its performance both in terms of gain and bandwidth. Adding grounded metal to the sides of the antenna can improve the antenna’s bandwidth.
The unique dual-core, dual-architecture capability of RP2350 allows users to choose between a pair of industry-standard Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open-hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores. You can use either Arm or RISC-V cores, so this is a great way to dabble in RISC-V development with an affordable board that has lots of peripherals. The M33 has an FPU, and is ‘basically’ 2x as fast as the M0+ of the RP2040 when we speed-tested it.
Not only is the Pico 2 twice as fast, it has twice as much RAM, 520KB compared to 264KB. The Pico also has twice as much FLASH memory, 4MB instead of 2MB, which will make it a much better board for CircuitPython usage where the internal memory is used to store files. There’s also one more PIO blocks (3 blocks with 4 state machines apiece, rather than 2) so you can do even more pin twiddling at once. For folks who want to use the RP2350 to generate high frequency output signals like DVI display output, you can use the HSTX (high speed transmission) peripheral rather than PIO.
For customers who wanted a more secure microcontroller for product design, the RP2350 provides a comprehensive security architecture, built around Arm TrustZone for Cortex-M, and incorporating signed boot, 8KB of antifuse OTP for key storage, SHA-256 acceleration, a hardware TRNG, and fast glitch detectors. These features, including the secure boot ROM, are extensively documented and available to all users without restriction: this transparent approach, which contrasts with the “security through obscurity” offered by legacy vendors, allows professional users to integrate RP2350, and Raspberry Pi Pico 2, into products with confidence.
Programmable in C / C++ and CircuitPython/MicroPython, and with detailed documentation, Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is the ideal microcontroller board for enthusiasts and professional developers alike. It makes an excellent upgrade to the RP2040, with lots of back-compatibility and some excellent upgrades.
Please note: The Pico 2W comes with the A2 version of the RP2350, which is affected by the E9 erratum. This erratum affects some uses of GPIO and PIO such as high-impedance inputs and the internal pulldowns. You may need to use 8.2K or smaller resistors if pull-downs are required. At this time, Sept 9 2024, there is no other version of the RP2350 available – only the A2 version.
From the GitHub release page:
This is CircuitPython 9.2.7, the latest bugfix revision of CircuitPython, and is a new stable release.
WARNING for nRF52 boards only: If your board has an nRF52 UF2 bootloader whose version is before 0.6.1, you will not be able to load CircuitPython 8.2.0 and later, due to increased size of the firmware. See these instructions for updating your bootloader.
displayio bindings are now called out with warnings. For instance, displayio.Display is deprecated in favor of busdisplay.BusDisplay. In CircuitPython 10.0.0 the deprecated bindings will be removed.Firmware downloads are available from the downloads page on circuitpython.org. The site makes it easy to select the correct file and language for your board.
To install follow the instructions in the Welcome to CircuitPython! guide. To install the latest libraries, see this page in that guide.
Try code.circuitpython.org or the latest version of the Mu editor for creating and editing your CircuitPython programs and for easy access to the CircuitPython serial connection (the REPL).
Documentation is available in readthedocs.io.
CircuitPython has a number of “ports” that are the core implementations for different microcontroller families. Stability varies on a per-port basis. As of this release, these ports are consider stable (but see Known Issues below):
atmel-samd: Microchip SAMD21, SAMx5xcxd56: Sony Spresenseespressif: Espressif ESP32, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3, ESP32-C2, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C6nordic: Nordic nRF52840, nRF52833raspberrypi: Raspberry Pi RP2040, RP2350stm: ST STM32F4 chip familyThese ports are considered alpha and will have bugs and missing functionality:
analog: Analog Devices MAX32690broadcom: Raspberry Pi boards such as RPi 4, RPi Zero 2Wespressif: ESP32-P4litex: fomumimxrt10xx: NXP i.MX RT10xxxrenode: hardware simulatorsilabs: Silicon Labs MG24 familystm: ST non-STM32F4 chip familieszephyr: multiplatform RTOS: testing with nRF5340, nRF54L15, RA6M5, STM32H7TileGrid.contains() when used with subclasses of TileGrid. #10192. Thanks @FoamyGuy.terminalio.Terminal with height of 1. #10210. Thanks @FoamyGuy.len() of a keypad.EventQueue. #10184. Thanks @dhalbert.audioio.AudioOut. #10182. Thanks @dhalbert.usb_cdc.Serial buffer when USB was disconnected. #10177. Thanks @Neradoc.PulseIn and PulseOut objects. #10190. Thanks @eightycc.audioio.AudioOut. #10182. Thanks @dhalbert.analogbufio.BufferedIn on RP2350B. #10202. Thanks @dhalbert.board.A3 (GPIO29) with analogbufio.BufferedIn on CYW43 boards. #10202. Thanks @dhalbert.-isystem to simplify including the correct header files for raspberrypi builds. #10188. Thanks @jepler.-Wype-limits gcc warnings, and fix them. #10187. Thanks @jepler.Waveshare ESP32-C6 LCD 1.47: fix NeoPixel colors. #10204. Thanks @Neradoc.
.pre-commit-config.yaml. #10205. Thanks @dhalbert.winterbloom_sol board.Thank you to all who used, tested, and contributed toward this release, including the contributors above, and many others on GitHub and Discord. Join us on the Discord chat to collaborate.
