I was talking with a friend and learned about Solder Party’s RP2040 Stamp. I was especially intrigued by their “round carrier”, which was the first “breakout” board I could actually see using unaltered in a bunch of projects, as it has USB-C and a LiPo battery connector onboard, plus a really nifty ring of neopixels. It’s a great size for tiny light shows, which are definitely a thing we do a lot in the winter.
Anyway, here’s my initial experience with installing demos from the pico-examples repository on a RP2040 Stamp and Round Carrier.
When it arrived, the stamp had the MicroPython firmware installed. I was able to reset it by pressing the reset button on the stamp twice. Then the “RPI-RP2” drive showed up, and I could just copy a UF2 file onto that.
The problem is that the examples (and my own projects) don’t include support for
resetting by pressing the reset button twice. As soon as I installed any
example, I lost the ability to reset for the next upload.
To reset the stamp, I had to connect the bootsel pin to ground, and then at
the same time hit the reset button on the stamp. I did this by holding
alligator clips on one side of the board and pressing reset on the other side.
After working with the
picoprobe, I’m kind of
spoiled, this was a bit fiddlier than I was hoping for.
Sadly, none of the other carriers offered by Solder Party expose a button to
ground bootsel. My plan is to make a breadboard rig with a button to do that,
and also one that exposes the pins to connect a picoprobe.
Because the stamp exposes pins on four sides, you can only really hook up two parallel sides on a standard breadboard. If you hook up all four, two sides of the stamp will have all pins connected to each other. Long term I’d love to find or make a setup with four breakout boards surrounding a flexypin holder, which would give me access to everything.
For now, given that all the pins I want are on the same side, I can hopefully just put down headers that straddle a normal breadboard and drop the stamp onto that. (I got the idea for this from a YouTube video covering using the RP2040 stamp with Hopper). I can connect the headers on the other side to the breadboard as well, which will give me easy access to GPIO pins 10-19.
Given that the round carriers are super cheap and I’ll probably use a bunch of them, I may just modify one round carrier to add SWD connections, and use that unit for initial development. I may do that once I’ve confirmed that I can use SWD on a breadboard setup.
Anyway, that’s my initial experience working with the stamp and round carrier.