Last January the maker scene was taken by surprise when Raspberry Pi launched their Pico Board and their brand-new RP2040 microcontroller – a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ running at 133 MHz – as brains. At the same time, Arduino too announced an RP2040-based board, but they did not follow up. Today, some four months later, Arduino finally fulfilled their promise with the introduction of the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.
The RP2040 Processor
This system-on-a-chip is a 32-bit dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, clocked at 133MHz and is powerful enough to run TensorFlow Lite. It’s young but proving to be incredibly popular with makers, as well as electronics manufacturers. It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see how the Arduino community reacts to it. We can only imagine what you guys can achieve with the extra features of the Nano RP2040 Connect board.
At its core, the Nano RP2040 Connect isn’t all that different from the Pi Pico. Both microcontrollers run on Raspberry Pi silicon, feature 264KB of SRAM, and offer 16MB of off-chip flash memory. Plus, the Nano RP2040 Connect is compatible with the full RP2040 software ecosystem, so you can easily integrate it into your RP2040 project or use it to replace a Pi Pico board.
But that’s where the similarities end. For one, the Nano RP2040 Connect supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low-Energy (v4.2), which opens the door to smart home projects and remote control over your board. There’s also a built-in microphone for sound or voice activation, an RGB LED, and a six-axis motion sensor with machine learning capabilities. To top it all off, the Nano RP2040 Connect has a ton of GPIO pins—22 digital, 8 analog, and 20 with PWM.