Waveshare has released a new development board for makers that are partial to the Raspberry Pi Pico's RP2040. Being one of our favorite microcontrollers, we found the opportunity to share hard to ignore. This new board is called the RP2040-GEEK and it sports a color LCD screen on one side as well as access to some useful ports.
One of the biggest and most notable features of the RP2040-GEEK is the programmable screen. The module sports a 1.4-inch LCD display with a resolution of 240 x 135px. It can display a plenty of colors, with a range of 65k confirmed in the official specs from Waveshare. This makes it easy to create your own graphics that respond to the various connections it can make.
It wouldn't be a dev board without room to tinker and this board definitely has some input options to take advantage of. It has a TF card slot as well as special ports for accessing SWD, UART and I2C on the side. These ports resemble Stemma QT / Qwiic connections, it looks like the I2C connector is Stemma QT / Qwiic compatible, the others not so. The board comes with a few cables that have connectors on one end that split into jump wires on the other.
The hardware is housed inside a white plastic shell and can connect to machines using USB Type-A. According to Waveshare, the board uses open source firmware that can be modified as much or as little as desired. Just plug it in and use MicroPython to get started and begin developing.
The board is currently available on the official Waveshare website for $9.99 (USD). You can also find it over at AliExpress for $16.19 (USD). As of writing this article, we haven't had the opportunity to get our hands on it and can't vouch for its performance but it definitely looks fun to play with. If this board piqued your interest, we recommend checking out our list of best Raspberry Pi projects to see what else the maker community has been up to as of late.
