Seeed Studio's Latest XIAO Board Packs a Raspberry Pi RP2040 Into a Tiny Thumb-Size Dev Board
The latest RP2040-based dev board from Seeed, the XIAO RP2040 includes two buttons, an RGB LED, and 11 GPIO pins.
Seeed Studio has announced the launch of an ultra-compact microcontroller development board based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller: the XIAO RP2040.
"For our friends who are unfamiliar, the Seeeduino XIAO is the smallest Arduino compatible board in the Seeeduino family," Seeed Studio's ChunChun explains. "It has a rich interface and tiny size as well as a super low price. Because of this, the Seeeduino XIAO has become popular for use in a variety of maker projects, as well as in classrooms worldwide."
Learning from its experience with the Seeeduino XIAO, which translates simply to "small," the company is now launching a follow-up: the XIAO RP2040.
"The XIAO RP2040 has the same dimensions and interface as the Seeeduino XIAO," ChunChun writes. "It also supports Seeeduino XIAO's Expansion Board. You can easily solder it to your PCB board. The difference is that the XIAO RP2040 uses a more powerful RP2040 chip (Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz). It has 264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of onboard Flash memory, and adds an RGB LED and two buttons to make the main control board easier to debug."
The board also includes 11 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins with full pulse-width modulation (PWM) support, four analog inputs, and a design which is suitable for both breadboard use and surface mounting as a module to other boards. A USB Type-C port provides connectivity for both data and power.
The board supports any of the languages and firmwares an RP2040 can handle, including the official Arduino core along with both MicroPython and CircuitPython. It has also proven popular: "The first batch was sold out within two hours after going live," ChunChun explains, "with the expected shipping date for the next batch in early October."
The board isn't Seeed's first to use the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. The company unveiled the Wio RP2040, a larger breadboard-friendly board which paired the RP2040 with a Wi-Fi module for Internet of Things (IoT) projects, earlier this year.
More information is available on the Seeed wiki, while interested parties can be notified when the board is back in stock at its retail price of $5.40 before volume discounts on the Seeed shop.