Waveshare's RP2040-Tiny Offers a Compact Footprint — By Breaking Off USB and Buttons
Connect the daughterboard for ease of development, then lose it when you're ready to deploy for a minimal footprint.
Waveshare has announced the launch of an ultra-compact microcontroller board built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040, which achieves an impressively small footprint without sacrificing usability — by shifting buttons and the USB Type-C connector to a removable daughterboard.
The Waveshare RP2040-Tiny development board, brought to our attention by CNX Software, delivers on the promise of its name: the device measures just 18×23.5mm (around 0.71×0.93"), yet it includes the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at 133MHz, 264kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 2MB of off-chip flash storage — and includes 20 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins around three of its edges.
The secret to its size is that it lacks both reset and boot-selection buttons, and has no USB connector for power and programming — all nice-to-have features during a project's development process but which can be sacrificed at deployment to reduce the overall footprint. With that in mind, the fourth edge of the RP2040-Tiny includes a flat flexible circuit (FFC) cable connector for use with an optional daughterboard.
The daughterboard is where you'll find the missing buttons and a USB Type-C connector. The idea is simple: use both boards together during development to make it easier to program the microcontroller and iterate the firmware, then when you're ready to deploy you can lose the daughterboard and power the main board via one of its pins.
Despite its small size, the RP2040-Tiny includes all the biggest and best features of the RP2040 — including access to all four analog-to-digital converter (ADC) pins, 16 pulse-width modulation (PWM) channels, two SPI, two I2C, and two UART buses, plus the on-board clock and temperature sensor, and even finds room for a user-addressable RGB LED. The two Programmable Input/Output (PIO) blocks, which let you run state machines separately to the two Arm cores, are also present and correct.
The RP2040-Tiny is now available on the Waveshare store for $4.49 before volume discounts; adding the USB daughterboard and FFC cable increases the price to $4.99.