Pimoroni's Servo 2040 Drives 18 Servos, Six Analog Sensors, and More with a Single RP2040

Sheffield-based electronics specialist Pimoroni has launched a new board built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, and it's an undeniably impressive creation: a controller for a whopping 18 servos, plus six analog sensors, dubbed the Servo 2040.

"Servo 2040 is a standalone servo controller for making things with lots of moving parts," the company writes of its latest board design, teased back in February but only now available for sale. "It has pre-soldered pin headers for plugging in up to 18 servos — enough for the leggiest of hexapod walkers or plenty of degrees of freedom for your robotic arms, legs or tentacles."

Given that the board supports an impressive 18 servo motors, Pimoroni has added current monitoring capabilities so as to keep power draw under control. There are also six addressable RGB LEDs on board for use as status lights or simple decoration, six inputs for analog sensors, and a Qwiic/STEMMA QT header for external hardware.

At the heart of the Servo 2040 is, as the name implies, a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller offering two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at up to 133MHz, or higher out-of-spec, with 264kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 2MB of external QSPI flash with execute-in-place (XIP) compatibility. Power and data are provided over USB Type-C, while a cuttable trace allows the board to drive high-voltage servos from an external power supply.

"We've built the RP2040 microcontroller right into Servo 2040, so you don't need separate microcontroller and servo driver boards," Pimoroni explains, while promising libraries for C++ and MicroPython — but admitting that CircuitPython support is limited to a maximum of 16 servos. "This makes for nice compact builds — perfect for small robots!"

The board is now available to buy from Pimoroni at $26.20, with optional servos starting at $4.45.