New RP2040 Board from Adafruit – KB2040 Review!

This video gives you a first look and review of the brand new KB2040 board from Adafruit. Adafruit are targeting the KB2040 as a mechanical keyboard driver. This board is a great alternative to the Raspberry Pi Pico for those projects where you need the same features in a smaller package! The Adafruit KB2040 uses the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and has 8MB of on-board flash storage and a USB-C connector. It also features a user programmable RGB Neopixel LED on the topside of the board and a green power LED. In many ways it acts just like the Raspberry Pi Pico, just with far more features in a smaller package - including a reset button! It measures in at 33mm x 17.8mm.

for most projects, this board trades blows with the Sparkfun Pro Micro RP2040, for about a dollar or so more, you can get 16MB of RAM instead of 8 in the KB2040. So, I suppose you can really take your pick between the two. I personally think this board is a good form factor for the RP2040 chip with plenty of features.

The RP2040 chip supports 4 12-bit ADC channels (4 are user inputs and one measures internal temperature), two UARTs, two SPI and I2C controllers. It also has 8 PIO state machines, USB 1.1 host and device support and 16 PWM channels. Programming any of these Waveshare RP2040 boards is exactly the same as programming the Pico. It can be programmed using the Raspberry Pi RP2040 SDK. Just press the boot select button whilst plugging the USB-C cable in and drag and drop the UF2 file onto the KB2040. It will then reboot and run your program! It can also be programmed in MicroPython and CircuitPython.

Let me know in the comments if you would like to see some projects featuring the KB2040!

The ItsyBitsy RP2040 is available from Adafruit here: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5302

See our Adafruit QT PY RP2040 Review here:    • First Look at the Adafruit QT Py RP20...  
and our Adafruit Feather RP2040 Review here:    • First Look at the Adafruit Feather RP...  
and our Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040 Review here:    • Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040 Review - Gr...  

Take a look at some other RP2040 boards covered here:
   • RP2040 Microcontroller Overviews  

You can find more embedded systems tutorials and projects on our website https://learnembeddedsystems.co.uk

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:32 Price
02:11 Dimensions
02:25 Features
04:40 Pinout + GPIO
06:47 Thoughts & Conclusions

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