Other people from [Adafruit] are appearing off a neat hack – USB host on RP2040, the usage of the now-famous PIO peripheral. [Adafruit] builds numerous RP2040 forums, and of course, you gotta check them earlier than you send them to shoppers. They’ve been the usage of very explicit Teensies for that, and in the future, the ones changed into unobtainium. In response to the paintings of [sekigon-gonnoc] and with assist of [Thach], they’ve made their TinyUSB library give a boost to bitbanging of USB over PIO, and effectively ported their check jig firmware to it!
The bottom Pico-PIO-USB repo through [sekigon-gonnoc] displays a sexy spectacular scenario – with low-speed and full-speed USB host and full-speed USB software modes supported, and fairly a couple of examples to get you began. [Adafruit]’s paintings integrates this code into their TinyUSB stack, particularly that specialize in MST (mass garage) options – as that is what you want to program a RP2040. In fact, in addition they supply a mass garage instance in addition!
Take a look at jigs are lovely necessary to have when making more than one items of a board, and with RP2040 supporting increasingly more interfaces because of PIO, it appears like the easiest chip to your subsequent manufacturing testing-intended PCB. With the jig brains sorted, you’ll wish to glance into development no much less necessary mechanical phase, and we’ve coated fairly a couple of tactics to kind that out – right here’s an OpenSCAD script that generates lasercutting recordsdata out of KiCad forums, or a jig constructed out of scrap copperclad FR4, and a sexy in depth educational on making your individual lasercuttable jigs, in addition.