I’m trying out a few things with Raspberry Pi Pico variants, and used a breakout board that I found to be especially convenient. I’m taking a moment to talk about it here and why I liked it. Generally, when I’ve worked with single board computers and Microcontrollers I’ve started off using a breadboard for any circuitry that I wanted to connect to it. There are times when that feels like overkill, such as just when connecting a couple of connectors to the board. In these cases, the breakout board is especially convenient.

When I ordered my boards, I didn’t get all boards of the same type. The board that stands out is one that stands out is from Freenove (affiliate link). There are a few things that make it stand out from the other boards. A small but noticeable convenience is that this board comes with a small screwdriver for the terminal block headers. This board also came fully assembled; many of the other boards ship as a circuit board with components that need to soldered to be usable. The most stand-out feature of the board is that it has status LEDs. There’s a LED for each one of the GPIO pins along with for power and some other signals.

Many microcontroller boards and SBCs have a LED that can be driven by one of the GPIOs, which is great when testing that “Hello World” program and ensuring that your build tools are successful. With the status on other pins, it becomes easier to diagnose otherwise simple programming errors. In one case, I forgot to initialize a pin as an output pin and was able to visually observe that nothing was being written. There was no need to attach the probes to identify what was actually happening.

All of the breakout boards I tried had some form of labelling on the pins. Unfortunately, that text is generally a little too small for me to read. But the Freenove board colors the GPIO and GND labels differently, making it easier to at a glance differentiate between pins. I’ll talk more about one of my experiences in a following post.

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