Raspberry Pi Pico board partners are slowly releasing their RP2040 'Pi Silicon' based boards. So far, we have seen boards from Pimoroni and Adafruit, but hot on their heels is the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. In a recent tweet, we see Arduino using this board in a computer vision carrier board.
Experimenting with computer vision on the upcoming #Arduino Nano #RP2040 Connect! 👀 Loving this hot slice of @Raspberry_Pi silicon, @EbenUpton! 💖 pic.twitter.com/3Q1tFNbQfQMarch 17, 2021
The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect will be the first partner board, based upon Raspberry Pi's RP2040 SoC, to come with WiFi and Bluetooth via a ublox NINA-W102 module. A 9-axis IMU sensor and microphone are icing on the cake for what could be the leading RP2040 for IoT.
With this latest tweet, we see an OV7675 640 x 480 camera capable of up to 30fps is used for computer vision and machine learning projects, some of which Arducam is also working on. The tweet shows the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect on a custom carrier board that also provides six Grove style connectors, one of which is labeled for I2C use. Judging by the quality of the PCB and silkscreen printing, we hazard a guess that this is a prototype of an accessory that may be available to support the Arduino board.
The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect looks to be the go-to RP2040 board for IoT applications. It can be programmed using the Arduino Create web editor, and support will be added to the Arduino IDE via a future update. As this is an RP2040 board, it will also support MicroPython and possibly CircuitPython should there be a demand.
There is still no indication on price or availability, but we will review this board and many other RP2040 boards from other partners.
