I got one of their prior maker pi pico boards and a really great bit of kit and value. This, however, looks better in the respect that they include extra's and those grove connectors add some real value if you look for some upon eBay or amazon, not as cheap as you would expect for bits of wire and plastic.
It's well labelled. Perhaps if the SPI Flash has a footprint compatible with a higher density alternative then it could just be desoldered and swapped. Given that the buyer has tools and knowledge to do that. But yes, an off the shelf option would be better. Cheers,
Thanks for discussing all the 'parts'on the board. Now what really wanna know is what can I DO with it? Some practical illustrations of its features and highlights will help novices like myself a lot. Thanks.
Thanks for the review. Love your sharing. I am from Malaysia, and any new board produce by cytron is good product. Price wise i would say fairly reasonable with the packaging accessories. Looking forward for any sharing for the applications of this board.
Sharing GP26 between grove 5 and grove 6 is a bit odd. And then completely breaking the pattern to have grove7 use GP7 and GP28... just breaks what is otherwise such a nice pattern. Still, wire routing may have gotten in the way of that. Otherwise, it looks interesting.
The PIO state machines are great for robotics and motor control, but very rarely implemented, due to unfamiliarity by novice programmers. They run in parallel, and do not use the two compute cores at all.
Grove 5 and Grove 6 look like they are sharing one pin according to the labels printed on that PCB... Is that true, or is it a mistake in labeling? Pin GP26 is labeled on both Grove 5 and Grove 6 in this video, and I don't see any other pin sharing between the Grove connectors.
Are there any products similar to this for actual robotics projects, with more motor functionality on-board, preferably with wifi/ble built in, but at a comparable price point? Every time I look for RP2040 robotics boards, results are flooded with nothing but this, and IMO there's not really enough on-board motor functionality to be a competent robotics board, if I wanted a mess of additional boards and additional wiring I'd just use a Pico on a bread board or the typical GPIO breakout boards; there's also the issue where Pico companion boards can get a bit overpriced, and even more overpriced when you consider you also need additional driver boards, whereas RP2040-based boards seem to be fairly well priced. I did find an open sourced board, but the only physical variant of the board seems to be through a $100 kit for an RC car.
