Challenger RP2040 WiFi

The Challenger RP2040 WiFi is an Arduino/Micropython compatible Adafruit Feather format micro controller board based on the Raspberry Pico chip.

When we designed this board we took our existing Challenger M0 WiFi board and replaced the SAMD21 micro controller with the extremely powerful dual core RP2040 Cortex-M0 device. So the main controller of this board is the RP2040 which has 264KByte of SRAM internally and 8MByte of external FLASH memory.

WiFi

Just like the Challenger M0 WiFi it has a  ESP8285 WiFi chip. For those of you that is unfamiliar with this device, it is basically an ESP8266 device with an integrated 1MByte of flash memory. This allows us to have an AT command interpreter inside this chip that the main controller can talk to and connect to you local WiFi network. The communications channel between the two devices is an unused UART on the main controller and the standard UART on the ESP8285. As simple as it can be.

The ESP8285 chip comes pre-flashed with Espressif’s AT command interpreter stored in the internal 1MByte of the ESP8285. This interpreter support most of the operating and sleep modes of the standard ESP8266 framework which makes it easy to work with. Talking to the device is as easy as opening the second serial port (Serial2), resetting the ESP8285 and start listening for events and sending commands

USB Type C

In the recent years we have noticed that we are seeing more and more USB Type C cable laying around the lab due to the fact that all new phones and accessories use them. As of yet we haven’t seen any shortage of micro USB cables but we are not getting any new ones any more and old ones do break occasionally. So we decided to go for a USB Type C connector for this board. A bonus of this is that they are quite bit more durable and you don’t have to fiddle with the cable before plugging it in.