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On the slim green board is minimal circuitry to get you going: A 5V to 3.3V power supply converter, single green LED on GP25, boot select button, RP2040 chip with dual-core Cortex M0, 2 MegaBytes of QSPI flash storage, and crystal. There are no true analog output (DAC) pins. All of the GPIO pins are 3.3V logic, and are not 5V-safe so stick to 3V! You get a total of 26 GPIO pins, 3 of those can be analog inputs (the chip has 4 ADC but one is not broken out).
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There’s 20 pads on each side, with groups of general purpose input-and-output (GPIO) pins interleaved with plenty of ground pins. The Pico is 0.825” x 2” and can have headers soldered in for use in a breadboard or perfboard, or can be soldered directly onto a PCB with the castellated pads.
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This low-cost microcontroller board features a powerful new chip, the RP2040, and all the fixin’s to get started with embedded electronics projects at a stress-free price. The Raspberry Pi foundation changed single-board computing when they released the Raspberry Pi computer, now they’re ready to do the same for microcontrollers with the release of the brand new Raspberry Pi Pico.
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