“A Pico with USB-C and a built-in reset is already great, but that it's easily usable with portable battery packs and therefore is easy to use in mobile or cosplay projects is even better.”
“I'm making a little RGB cat thing as a gift, right now I only have the components working. I included a video below, and if possible will update this review with the final 'CatCube'.
But I am in love with the rp2040 pico boards and this board improves upon the regular pico. This particular model comes with 16MB of flash storage which is a lot for such a compact microcontroller. Of course, the main selling point is the fact you can plug a LiPo battery straight onto the board, which is great seeing they haven't increased the footprint of the Pico Lipo in comparison to the regular RP Pico.
Little things that are a bit irritating:
- Unlike the SEEEDUINO RP2040, this has components on the underside of the board, meaning you can't easily surface mount it to a PCB
- Mounting this is also difficult because it doesn't have screw holes
- It is difficult to power components straight from the board if you don't want to use the single 3V regulated output of the Pico
But these are issues most people can work around, the pico itself and many other boards have the same issues.
CircuitPython support is a dream come true, CircuitPython seems impossible to me on such a small microcontroller. However, the RP2040 chipset runs the code effortlessly, it runs seriously fast for an interpreted language. Coding with C/C# is going to be faster, but the bootloader is like cutting butter with a burning hot chef's knife when it comes to CircuitPython. Just drag and drop your code files or edit them directly from the device, it means you can gift someone a project and if you want to update the firmware just send them a folder full of files for them to drag and drop onto the Pico. If you haven't tried CircuitPython, do it now it is so impressive.
What else is there to say really? It's a fine piece of electronics and it is baffling how perfectly executed these 3rd party Pico boards are becoming. I recommend this product, but if you are doing a small project the 4MB version is plenty. Have a look around though, there are also many other different and unique Pico boards, if you have enough dough buy a few different ones to suit your use case.”
“Really cool. I got it for the built-in battery connection which works a treat. Having the pinouts labelled on the board is very handy when wiring up. Unlike the original pico it has components on the underside which might be an issue.”
“This is such a great board! I love how it retains the RPi Pico pinout and compatibility, but at the same time also fixes most of its annoyances. I particularly like the USB-C connector, the Stemma QT/Qwiic connector, the clear silkscreen markings, the power button that double-functions as a reset button, and the boot button that double-functions as a user-programmable button. Together these features make it so much more convenient to use than an RPi Pico.
Then why only 4 out of 5 stars? It's relatively expensive for an RP2040 board. The announced 4MB version of this board will probably address this up to a point, but for me the ideal version would ironically ditch the LiPo/Li-Ion circuitry as well. I don't have a use for it in most of my projects, so it only adds to the costs. A 4MB Pimoroni Pico NoLiPo for a good price would be my Goldilocks board and I would totally see it replacing the RPi Pico in all of my projects!”
