Melopero's Shake RP2040 Aims to Be Your Go-To Feather-Format Raspberry Pi Pico Alternative

With 16MB of flash, a single-color and an RGB LED, physical reset button, LiPo charging circuit, and USB Type-C, the Shake looks good.

Italian electronics firm Melopero has become the latest to launch a development board built around Raspberry Pi's popular RP2040 microcontroller: The Melopero Shake RP2040, which uses a Feather form factor and adds a few nice extra features.

Designed to be software-compatible with the Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP2040-based development boards — which means support for C/C++, MicroPython, CircuitPython, and the Arduino IDE — the Shake RP2040 uses a Feather form factor and pinout — making it a drop-in replacement, in theory at least, for other Feather-format boards.

As well as the RP2040, which includes two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores and two programmable input/output (PIO) blocks with up to eight state machines total, the board's design includes 16MB of external flash memory, a lithium-polymer battery charging circuit for 3.7-4.2V batteries with a 200mA charge current, physical reset and boot buttons, and a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for external hardware.

The design also moves away from the micro-USB of the Raspberry Pi Pico in favour of a USB Type-C connector, adds a single-color green LED and a WS2812 RGB LED, and includes a Serial Wire Debug (SWD) header for hardware debugging.

While it's hard to argue with that feature set, adding all those extras does mean a price hike over the ultra-low-cost $4 Raspberry Pi Pico: Melopero has launched the board on its web store at €22.90 (around $27) — and the switch to the Feather form factor loses the castellated headers that allow the Raspberry Pi Pico to be easily surface mounted.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles