Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) Microcontroller
The standard microcontroller used in the labs, and on the Leeds Beckett development board, is the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi site has the official source of data for these microcontrollers.
The Raspberry Pi foundation currently also packages the RP2040 microcontroller onto four development boards. Shown below these are the Raspberry Pi Pico (far left), Pico H (middle left), Pico W (middle right), and Pico WH (far right). Boards with the ‘H’ designation have standard 0.1” headers (suitable for use on breadboards): the other boards have castellations for direct soldering.
The Leeds Beckett development boards use the Pico WH, with both the Pi Pico and Pi Pico H available from the Helpdesk. A pin diagram for the Pico WH is also shown below, with printable versions for all four boards below.
In most cases the Pico (Pico H) and Pico W (Pico WH) are interchangeable, apart from the additional user LED on the Pico W and Pico WH. For details of the component and electrical changes between the four boards, see the official documentation.
Pico Board Pin Diagrams
Pico Board Datasheet
As standard, the Pico boards come with 264kB of SRAM, and 2MB of on-board flash memory. All versions use a dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ processor, clocked by default to 133 MHz. You also have 26 multi-function General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins on each Pico board. Depending on the task, you can also reconfigure the GPIO pins as a combination of 2× SPI, 2× I2C, 2× UART, 3× 12-bit ADC, or 16x controllable PWM channels. See the pin diagrams above, and the datasheet below, for the specific combinations allowed.