Outputting digital video is nothing new for the Raspberry Pi Pico. In the early days, Raspberry Pi engineer Luke Wren came up with the Pico DVI Sock to port HDMI to Pico.That project was later refined Pico DVIAdafruit’s latest board, Feather RP2040 with DVI It might not be a catchy name, but it integrates HDMI/DVI outputs into the familiar Feather form factor.
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The RP2040 SoC has previously graced Adafruit’s Feather form factor. The Adafruit Feather RP2040 won the Editor’s Choice award upon release and has been on the Best RP2040 Boards list for two years.
The form factor doesn’t give you all of Pico’s GPIO pins, but it does give you Stemma QT, onboard battery charging, and an easy-to-read GPIO pin reference. The Feather RP2040 with DVI provides these exact features and also offers a digital video output, DVI, that works with any HDMI monitor with an HDMI-to-DVI adapter.No sound so far though
| system on chip | Raspberry Pi RP2040 |
| row 1 – cell 0 | Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ 133MHz CPU |
| row 2 – cell 0 | 264KB of SRAM |
| depository | 8MB flash |
| GPIOs | 21 x multi-function 3.3V GPIO pins |
| row 5 – cell 0 | 8 unused pins |
| row 6 – cell 0 | Stema QT |
| row 7 – cell 0 | DVI (HDMI) port |
| Power | USB C (power and data) |
| row 9 – cell 0 | Hot-swappable Li-Po charging port |
| video output | 640×480 or 800×480 |
| size | 53×23.3×7.7mm |
The Adafruit board is inherently linked with CircuitPython, but to get the most out of this new board you will need to use the PicoDVI library. Arduino Or Pico SDK. Generating video via RP2040 requires his one core in a dual core SoC and uses both programmable IOs (PIOs).
Generating a 320 x 240 video requires 150KB of 264KB SRAM and 400 x 240 requires 190KB of 264KB SRAM, so resources are tight. His I2C pins on the HDMI connector are connected to the SDA/SCL pins on the Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI. This allows the user to read his EDID EEPROM on the display, useful for debugging.
Adafruit is Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI Pricing is not listed at this time, as it’s “coming soon”.
