Adafruit KB2040 controller: Pro Micro size, awesome RP2040 power #Keyboards #RP2040 @KbdNews

Adafruit announced the preliminary pinouts of its RP2040 based KB2040 controller.

Featuring a Raspberry Pi RP2040 with a dual ARM Cortex-M0+ running at up to 133MHz with 264kB on-chip SRAM and built in USB, the Adafruit KB2040 seems to be a Raspberry Pi Pico alternative in a Pro Micro form factor.

Designers at Adafruit seem to be aware of the importance of Pro Micro compatibility among keyboard enthusiasts.

We’re comparing to the popular pro micro boards that folks use for keebs. so far so good – it’s a lot to fit into such a small board but we think it’s all there! – Phillip Torrone.

So this controller has 18 easily accessible GPIO pins like the original Pro Micro?

Yes there are 18 GPIO pins accessible along the pads, plus another 2 on the JST SH connector – those are intended for I2C access. We also broke out the D+ and D- pins for folks who want to have the USB connector elsewhere.

Also, is the footprint 100% Pro Micro compatible?

Yep! The physical size is the same with the pads in the same location. For pin usage, there are a few differences: the RP2040 does not have as many analog pins, for example, but it can have PWM on any pad. All the peripherals: UART/I2C/SPI and the GPIO numbers, are the same locations.

Note that QMK is not available for RP2040 yet (https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/issues/11649) so we recommend using CircuitPython/KMK or Arduino for now (Here is a guide for simple HID keyboards in CircuitPython and this one covers key matrices and scanning for more advanced builds.)

Read more in the KBD article

Giveaway – Celebrating The First Anniversary Of Starting KBD.news

KBD.news turns one on November 20!

The first “issue” was a simple, humble text post on Reddit (here, in a test-sub), a simple list of links, without any bells and whistles.

Today, after 50+ issues published and 1000+ projects featured, the website is checked by 40,000 unique users in a month and the weekly newsletter is sent to 1,500 subscribers.

To celebrate these achievements of the past year, I reached out to some vendors (the vendor database and map came in handy) and many were kind enough to offer various prizes for my readers and subscribers.

So thank you for reading, subscribing and following — check the prizes, apply through the form, send some love to the sponsors, and good luck with the raffle!