Pico-SPE

Overview

The Pico-SPE is a small, low-cost, versatile boards from KWS Computersysteme Gmbh. They are equipped with an RP2040 SoC, an on-board LED, a USB connector, an SWD interface. The Pico-SPE additionally contains an Microchip LAN8651 10Base-T1S module. The USB bootloader allows the ability to flash without any adapter, in a drag-and-drop manner. It is also possible to flash and debug the boards with their SWD interface, using an external adapter.

Hardware

  • Dual core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor running up to 133MHz

  • 264KB on-chip SRAM

  • 16MB on-board QSPI flash with XIP capabilities

  • 16 GPIO pins

  • 3 Analog inputs

  • 2 UART peripherals

  • 2 I2C controllers

  • 16 PWM channels

  • USB 1.1 controller (host/device)

  • 8 Programmable I/O (PIO) for custom peripherals

  • On-board LED

  • 1 Watchdog timer peripheral

  • Microchip LAN8651 10Base-T1S

Supported Features

The pico_spe board supports the hardware features listed below.

on-chip / on-board
Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
2 / 2
Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files.
vnd,foo
Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.

Pin Mapping

The peripherals of the RP2040 SoC can be routed to various pins on the board. The configuration of these routes can be modified through DTS. Please refer to the datasheet to see the possible routings for each peripheral.

External pin mapping on the Pico-SPE is identical to the Pico, but note that internal RP2040 GPIO lines 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21 are routed to the Microchip LAN8651 on the Pico-SPE.

Default Zephyr Peripheral Mapping:

  • UART0_TX : P0

  • UART0_RX : P1

  • I2C0_SDA : P4

  • I2C0_SCL : P5

  • I2C1_SDA : P6

  • I2C1_SCL : P7

  • ADC_CH0 : P26

  • ADC_CH1 : P27

  • ADC_CH2 : P28

Programmable I/O (PIO)

The RP2040 SoC comes with two PIO periherals. These are two simple co-processors that are designed for I/O operations. The PIOs run a custom instruction set, generated from a custom assembly language. PIO programs are assembled using pioasm, a tool provided by Raspberry Pi.

Zephyr does not (currently) assemble PIO programs. Rather, they should be manually assembled and embedded in source code. An example of how this is done can be found at drivers/serial/uart_rpi_pico_pio.c.

Sample: SPI via PIO

The BME280 humidity and pressure sensor sample includes a demonstration of using the PIO SPI driver to communicate with an environmental sensor. The PIO SPI driver supports using any combination of GPIO pins for an SPI bus, as well as allowing up to four independent SPI buses on a single board (using the two SPI devices as well as both PIO devices).

Programming and Debugging

The pico_spe board supports the runners and associated west commands listed below.

flash debug

The SWD interface can be used to program and debug the device, e.g. using OpenOCD with the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe .

The overall explanation regarding flashing and debugging is the same as for Raspberry Pi Pico. Refer to Programming and Debugging for more information. N.b. OpenOCD support requires using Raspberry Pi’s forked version of OpenOCD.

Below is an example of building and flashing the Blinky application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b pico_spe samples/basic/blinky
west flash --openocd /usr/local/bin/openocd