Nigeria-based Ahmsville Labs has launched an fascinating improvement board, which pairs a Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core microcontroller with a high-resolution magnetic rotary encoder on a spherical PCB — designed for insertion right into a 3D-printed knob housing.
“The Pico Dev M3 is a improvement board based mostly on Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 microcontroller chip,” the corporate explains of its design. “The board can also be a high-resolution magnetic rotary encoder when paired with a number of 3D-printed components, which makes this the proper board for functions and initiatives that may profit from having a rotary encoder — a great instance is making macro pads, and different related secondary controllers.”
The round PCB is constructed across the RP2040, a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ clocked at a inventory 133MHz and with 264kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM). To this Ahmsville Labs has added 2MB of QSPI exterior flash whereas bringing out 19 general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins together with 16 pulse-width modulation (PWM) channels, two analog inputs, two UART, two I2C, and two SPI buses.
The Pico Dev M3 takes a Raspberry Pi RP2040 and turns it right into a multifunction dev board for rotary encoder work. (📷: Ahmsville Labs)
The on-board rotary encoder affords a base 36-step decision, extendable to 36,000 steps per revolution. A lot of the circumference of the board, in the meantime, is festooned with a complete of 18 individually-addressable LEDs — leaving room just for a USB Kind-C connector to at least one facet for information and energy. The 3D-printable housing, in the meantime, turns the board right into a rotary knob — albeit one which’s completely stand-alone.
Ahmsville Labs is promoting the Pico Dev M3 on Tindie at $21.20 for the board alone or $41.50 with the rotary encoder {hardware} added. The corporate has pledged to launch pattern supply code and the 3D print recordsdata for the encoder housing on the undertaking’s GitHub repository, however on the time of writing solely a placeholder file was revealed.
