#rp2040

Bus Pirate 5 is in stock and shipping now, going fast! 🚌 🏴‍☠️

Bus Pirate 5 is the latest edition of the original universal serial interface trusted by hackers since 2008. We've stocked and loved the Bus Pirate 4 for years and are excited to see the latest and greatest from the minds at WhereLabs.

The Bus Pirate is a RP2040 based, open-source hardware debugging tool that converts simple commands into common bus protocols such as 1-Wire, I2C, SPI, UART, several LEDs and more. Send commands to a chip or sensor and get the response, without writing a line of code.

Don’t use the Raspberry Pi 2040 to build a DCC decoder.

It’s not really wrong, of course, and it gives you ridiculous amounts of computing power, but to get that you need miles and miles of extra components. Like a dozen of decoupling capacitors, an external oscillator, and of course an external flash memory. You can maybe do that sort of thing in H0, but for real model trains, it’s just not ideal. Pick something like an ATTiny or STM32C0 (I’ve done both for different projects): Cheap, just one or two decoupling capacitors, no external oscillator required and no external flash memory needed either.

The versions of the RP2350 with built in memory may be a better idea, once they fix the GPIO issues anyway, but still, there’s the oscillator and just way too many capacitors.

(Some of these concerns may be different if you want to add sound support, which requires more memory anyway. But I’d argue that sound in model railroads is a mistake anyway. I’ve never seen an N scale locomotive that sounds good, it’s all just an annoying expensive gimmick.)

Also while we’re at it, don’t use a cheap standard bridge rectifier. The steep slopes of the DCC signal mandate a really fast rectifier, typically Schottky diodes. This is particularly important when you have RailCom on your layout. You may need four individual diodes instead of one rectifier, but since you won’t need all the capacitors of the RP2040, you still win out in the end (it’s also typically smaller than the rather large SMD standard rectifiers).

Many years ago, I pulled an LCD out of a GPS unit from the days before cars and smartphones having navigation features. This LCD is a color LCD with a backlight. It’s a very different technology, and much more challenging to interface to. I can’t even find a proper datasheet for the module.

Coming soon - RP2040 "Bones" AdaLogger

USB C + HDMI combo panel-mount cable sample 🔌🖥️

We got this nifty panel-mount cable with a combo action: both USB C and DVI/HDMI connectors on both ends. This could be handy for single-board computers like Raspberry Pi's or our RP2040/RP2350 boards with DVI outputs

Coming soon - hippity hoppity here comes a floppity 💾 🐇

We had a quest to do some floppy projects back in 2022 (https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/02/09/refactor-of-adafruit_floppy-for-timer-support-mac-disk-success/) but our eyes were bigger than our BOM - many components we designed into this floppy interface board were not available… but now we're back and it's time to make the bestest floppy archiver/writer/emulator(?)

First is the power supply - we need both 5V and 12V. We tried sourcing split 5/12V supplies but were not successful. so instead we can have a 12V power plug and a 5V ~3A buck converter based on the TPS563201 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/TPS563201DDCT/5813458). we've also got a TPS259540 12V OVP chip (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/base-product/texas-instruments/296/TPS259540/28780) to make sure the 12V power supply doesn't get swapped with a 15V by accident. USB C can be used when no 12V is needed.

An RP2040 does all the heavy lifting for floppy interfacing. There's a 16M onboard flash plus an optional MicroSD card, so you can save raw disk flux dumps or 1:1 images. We tossed a 1.3" color TFT that might be useful for status updates. Also, we'd like to enable the ability to do off-line archiving - no computer is needed, and a display is essential.

NES Emulator for RP2040 DVI boards demo 🎮🕹️📺

The original Nintendo Entertainment System remains a popular target for emulation. This project pairs the surprisingly capable RP2040 microcontroller with a super-crisp HDMI display and, if you like, an original NES or SNES gamepad.