SparkFun Begins Shipping Its RP2040 Thing Plus Board, Packing 16MB of Flash Memory On-Board
Following the company's more compact RP2040 Pro Micro, the RP2040 Thing Plus includes a Feather layout, battery charging and a microSD slot.
SparkFun has begun shipping the RP2040 Thing Plus, its latest board design to feature the same RP2040 microcontroller as powers the popular Raspberry Pi Pico.
When Raspberry Pi announced it was releasing a microcontroller board, the Raspberry Pi Pico, it raised eyebrows; when it confirmed that the device was powered by the RP2040, the first-ever silicon to be designed by its in-house application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) team, it raised still more; when the company confirmed that RP2040 chips would be available for third parties to design boards around, nary an eyebrow was left unraised.
The latest board to take advantage of the new chip is the SparkFun RP2040 Thing Plus, which follows on from its earlier RP2040 Pro Micro design. "Besides the Thing Plus or Feather footprint (with 18 GPIO pins)," SparkFun's Xtopher writes of the new design, "the board also includes an SD card slot, 16 MB (128 Mbit) flash memory, a JST single cell battery connector (with a charging circuit and fuel gauge sensor), an addressable WS2812 RGB LED, JTAG PTH pins, four (4-40 screw) mounting holes, and our signature Qwiic connector."
The board is driven by the same RP2040 as the SparkFun RP2040 Pro Micro and the Raspberry Pi Pico, which means that software written for one should be entirely compatible with the others — unless of course it takes advantage of the additional flash memory available in the RP2040 Thing Plus.
Another change from the Raspberry Pi Pico's design is in the shift to a USB Type-C connector for power and data, in place of the Pico's micro-USB - an odd choice, given the Raspberry Pi single-board computer range made the move away from micro-USB to USB Type-C with the Raspberry Pi 4. The board also includes four 4-40 mounting holes and a dedicated hardware reset switch in addition to the boot-selection button.
All these features do, however, come at a premium: Where the Raspberry Pi Pico, which lacks battery charging support and has only 2MB of flash, costs just $4, the SparkFun RP2040 Thing Plus is priced at $17.95 with a maximum order limit of 100 per customer.