What has been the deal with RPi's decision to continue using micro-usb connectors? Is it just a huge price difference at the scale they're working at?
Not a big deal, but if everyone's going to complain about Apple not using USB-C, it's only fair to throw a bit of shade here at others creating micro USB products in 2023.
That aside, this looks like a useful board! I have an RP2040-based keyboard I made, and in the latest iteration I ended up using a TRS connector to expose the SWD wires. I wanted to also create a dedicated RP2040 debug board with a corresponding TRS connector, very similar to what's made here. Maybe I'll just buy one of these instead...
The cost of cables and receptacles is quite a bit lower for Micro USB Type-B connectors and these microcontroller products have tens-of-cents (or maybe even less) in price sensitivity.
The RPI4 has far less sensitivity and USB OTG, so it uses USB Type-C.
Micro-USB connectors are cheaper than USB-C connectors, and low cost is kind of Raspberry Pi's shtick. This is particularly important for their lower-end products, such as the Zero and Pico.
It sucks, but I kind of like how it has opened some space for rp2040 boards with differentiating features. Most are 2-3x cost, but still competitive with say, a teensy or high-end arduino.
That's fair enough, do you have a link to their response? I'm curious what the actual cost increase is. I'd be more than happy to pay an extra 50 cents or whatever for USB C :)
Someone in the comments had a good point - they provide a USB cable with the debug probe.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to use a USB-C connector, and _not_ provide a cable. It's not like the RP2040 is pushing any sort of high data transfer rates.
Oh well, I'm sure the people at the RPi foundation already had this discussion quite a few times.
They still did not upstream their openocd changes. I wonder what's the reason. Is their debug protocol so proprietary? OpenOCD works with many controllers out of the box, including ARM ones, but not raspico.
This looks really interesting. I haven't jumped into the Pico pool yet for my hobbyist microcontroller fun, but I guess I "should", it does look pretty cool and the price/availability is right. I was initially turned off by the lack of onboard flash, that made it look ... less mature/complete than e.g. most AVRs or STM32s.
I wonder if it's possible to port the Black Magic Probe [1] firmware to the RP2040 (as a host, I mean now)? I always felt the Black Magic seemed so nice, but haven't managed to get it running on the variety of Shady Blue/Black Pills [2] I've managed to get hold of the past few years.
Not a big deal, but if everyone's going to complain about Apple not using USB-C, it's only fair to throw a bit of shade here at others creating micro USB products in 2023.
That aside, this looks like a useful board! I have an RP2040-based keyboard I made, and in the latest iteration I ended up using a TRS connector to expose the SWD wires. I wanted to also create a dedicated RP2040 debug board with a corresponding TRS connector, very similar to what's made here. Maybe I'll just buy one of these instead...