Compact Beetle RP2040 Board by DFRobot for Microcontroller Projects with Limited Space

The Beetle RP2040 is an inexpensive compact form factor RP2040 board with beginner-friendly soldering pads, costing about $6.90.

A new variant of the Beetle line of small development boards from DFRobot is based on the well-liked RP2040 of the Raspberry Pi and features bigger pads that make soldering a breeze.

The business describes its most recent board design as "DFRobot Beetle RP2040, a development board based on the RP2040 processor." Its modest dimension of 27mm by 20mm [or around 1.06 by 0.79] makes it simple to incorporate into small gadgets or projects. With its dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ CPU, 264kB internal RAM, and compatibility for USB 1.1 devices, the RP2040 enables users to concentrate on function implementation rather than using excessive time and energy on enhancing programmes.

In addition to the RP2040 at the centre of the board, DFRobot has added physical reset and boot-selection buttons, 2MB of off-chip flash storage, and an onboard user-addressable LED. General-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for the RP2040 are carried out to bigger pads around the board's periphery, where they are finished in gold immersion, according to the manufacturer, making them simpler for beginners to solder.

Eight GPIO pins are accessible, two of which may be used as analogue inputs. Additionally, there are two UART, two I2C, and one SPI bus. The board may be powered by direct 3.3-5V input, however, like most RP2040-based boards, the pins themselves utilise 3.3V logic and are not 5V safe. Power and data are provided through a USB Type-C connection. All the common software platforms are supported by Beetle, including MicroPython, CircuitPython, Arduino, and pure C/C++ programming.

After the Beetle ESP32-C3 was introduced back in April, the Beetle RP2040 is DFRobot's second Beetle board this year. The layout of the two is considerably different, despite the fact that they both have tiny dimensions, and the compact prototype board created for use with the Beetle ESP32-C3 is incompatible with the new Beetle RP2040.

The Beetle RP2040 is currently offered on the DFRobot website for $6.90, which is $2.90 more expensive than the bigger Raspberry Pi Pico.