Nifty QTPy Breakout Board
LandBoards has come out with another nifty, compact breakout board — this time for the XAIO/QTPy boards from SeeedStudio/Adafruit respectively. The boards themselves are so tiny that having a carrier board to power and break out some I/O is a great way to expand their usability.
The breakout sports a DC barrel jack that can accept 7-15V (there’s a 5V regulator on-board) plus an SD card breakout that is wired to the SPI pins on the microcontroller. Despite having these additional features, it is still a tiny 49x49mm! With 4x 4-40 mounting holes, it’s easy to permanently attach to a project or use as a wearable device.
For those of you not familiar with these boards, they pack a lot of punch in a tiny package; the XIAO and original QTPy have the Microchip SAMD21G18 ARM Cortex-M0+, and the newer QTPy 2040 has the dual-core Raspberry Pi chip that seems to be slowly taking over the entire market! One of the nifty things about these boards is they can run MicroPython/CircuitPython or they can be programmed with the Arduino bootloader and then be programmed from the Arduino IDE. With the SD card breakout, this board can even run MMBASIC to get a retro-computing environment going!
LandBoards also produce a version without the SD card socket, instead breaking out the SPI pins to an additional header in case your project requires it. This nifty little breakout board is a great way to get started with the RP2040 or MicroPython in general!