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.