Raspberry Pi Pico Board – Unsoldered Pins

The Raspberry Pi Pico Board runs the RP2040, a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller built by Raspberry Pi. The pico board ships with unsoldered pins, meaning the 40-pin header is included but not pre-soldered, giving you the choice of orientation for breadboard use or direct PCB mounting. The RP2040 runs at up to 133MHz across both cores and has 264KB of SRAM on-chip. Onboard 2MB flash stores your MicroPython scripts or C firmware between power cycles.

A non-obvious detail about the RP2040 is its Programmable I/O (PIO) blocks. These are independent state machines that handle protocols like WS2812 LED timing or custom serial formats in hardware, freeing both cores for application logic. The pico unsoldered format matters here too — soldering pins yourself lets you choose flush-mount, right-angle, or castellated configurations depending on whether the board is going into a case or onto a PCB. The trade-off is clear though: with only 264KB SRAM and 2MB flash, running large Python projects that import many libraries simultaneously hits memory limits quickly. MicroPython itself takes around 50–60KB of RAM at startup.

Students learning embedded systems, hobbyists building MicroPython data loggers, and makers prototyping low-power sensor nodes all work with this board regularly. Thonny IDE has first-class support for the Pico and handles firmware, the REPL, and file transfers over the Micro-USB interface. The microcontroller board also works with the C/C++ SDK for bare-metal projects. Pick it up from StemVolt with fast dispatch across India.

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Features:

• Dual-core RP2040 runs two independent threads allowing sensor reads and USB comms simultaneously.
• 264KB SRAM holds active MicroPython variables and buffers without writing to flash mid-execution.
• 2MB onboard flash stores firmware and user scripts across full power-cycle resets reliably.
• 26 GPIO pins cover ADC, PWM, SPI, I2C, and UART for direct peripheral connections.

Technical specifications:

Applications:

• MicroPython projects with Raspberry Pi Pico log temperature and humidity over I2C every ten seconds.
• Raspberry Pi Pico Board reads four ADC channels and sends sensor values over USB serial to a laptop.
• Home weather station uses the 26 GPIO pins to connect a DHT22 sensor and OLED display simultaneously.
• PWM motor controller project drives two DC motors at variable speed using RP2040 hardware PWM outputs.

Package includes:

• 1 x Raspberry Pi Pico Board – Unsoldered Pins