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Raspberry Pi RP2040 Board Features Circular IPS Display
SB Components has been busy kicking off 2022 with a new selection of Raspberry Pi-based boards and we couldn’t be more excited. Just yesterday, we covered the new StackyPi project which features the RP2040 in a Pi Zero form factor. Today we’re sharing a couple of cool, "well-rounded" boards, including an RP2040 creation SB Components shared to Twitter with plans for an unspecified future release.
One of SB Components latest boards sees the Raspberry Pi Pico's RP2040 SoC soldered to a small breakout board which provides limited GPIO but brings a circular IPS display to the party. The other board appears to be an ESP12E (ESP8266 equivalent) providing Wi-Fi connectivity in the same package and with the same screen.
Power and data connectivity is via a micro USB. There are a limited selection of GPIO pins on the bottom edge of the board. Four pins marked GP0 to GP3 along with a 3v3 output pin and Ground. On the ESP12E the GPIO is limited to I2C and UART, but the pins may pull double-duty. The flash chip appears to be unpopulated on the ESP12E board but we hope that it will come with some amount of flash storage. The RP2040 version has no visible flash storage, and as the RP2040 has no onboard storage we have to assume that there is some flash storage underneath the display. Talking of storage space there is a microSD card slot which is most likely an SPI device and something that the Pico can easily use to save larger amounts of data, such as log files.
The most notable part of the new board design is the round OLED display. There is no scale reference for this screen but looking on SB Components website we found a 1.28 inch round LCD HAT that looks like a dead ringer. If this is true then the round IPS display connects via SPI and provides a 240 x 240 pixel resolution 65K RGB screen. Both this round display and PCB shape lend to its potential in smartwatch-like creations.
Want to get a closer look at these boards? Check out the original thread over at Twitter and be sure to follow SB Components for future updates.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
