Oak Development Technologies' Cast-Away RP2040 Is an Ultra-Compact Yet Feature-Rich Pico Alternative

Permissively-licensed open-hardware dev board offers Pico-like functionality in a compact footprint — and packs USB Type-C and an aRGB LED.

Gareth Halfacree
2 years agoHW101

Oak Development Technologies has unveiled another board built around Raspberry Pi's incredibly popular RP2040 microcontroller: the compact, castellated, surface-mountable Cast-Away RP2040.

"Cast your project fears away with the Cast-Away RP2040, a small and easy to use RP2040 dev board designed to take your project to the beach," writes Oak's Seth Kerr of his latest board design. "This board uses the popular Raspberry Pi RP2040, a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller."

The core of the Cast-Away RP2040 is, as Kerr notes, the Raspberry Pi RP2040 - the same microcontroller, the first product of Raspberry Pi's in-house application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design time, as drives the Raspberry Pi Pico. As with the Raspberry Pi Pico there's 2MB of off-chip flash memory alongside 264kB of static RAM (SRAM) on the microcontroller.

To this, Kerr has added a USB Type-C connector — an upgrade on the micro-USB found on the Raspberry Pi Pico — and a NeoPixel-compatible SK6812mini addressable RGB (aRGB) LED. There are physical boot and reset buttons located at the corners of the board, and the design has components on the top side only — making it suitable, in combination with the castellated GPIO headers, for surface mounting.

Given its considerably smaller dimensions, though, the Cast-Away RP2040 can't match the larger Raspberry Pi Pico for connectivity: 15 of the RP2040's GPIO pins are brought out to physical headers, including three analog pins, but only nine of these are accessible when the board is mounted on a breadboard. The 3.3V pin offers 500mA output for driving external devices, and there's support for drawing up to 3A at 5.5V from the VUSB pin when paired with a suitable USB Type-C power supply.

Kerr has released Eagle design files for the board under the permissive MIT license on his GitHub repository, while pre-assembled boards have been listed on the Oak Development Technologies Tindie store at $5.50 — but, at the time of writing, were listed as out-of-stock.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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