An all-in-one board for making battery powered contraptions that can move, (optionally) make noise, and talk to the internet!
Inventor 2350 W is a multi-talented board that does (almost) everything you might want a robot, prop or other mechanical thing to do. Drive a couple of standard motors (or fancy motors with encoders)? Yep! Add up to six servos? Sure? Attach a little speaker so you can make noise? No problem! It's also got a battery connector so you can power your inventions from AA/AAA or LiPo batteries and carry your miniature automaton/animated top hat/treasure chest that growls at your enemies around with you untethered.
You also get a ton of options for hooking up sensors and other gubbins - there's two Qw/ST connectors for attaching breakouts, three ADC pins for adding analog sensors, photoresistors and such, and three spare digital GPIO you could use for LEDs, buttons or digital sensors. Speaking of LEDs, we've also somehow managed to fit in 12 addressable LEDs (AKA Neopixels) - one for each servo and GPIO/ADC channel (or just use the whole lot for making rainbows, that's fine too).
Best of all though, is the brains of the outfit - the onboard Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, which will give your creations 2.4GHz wireless connectivity. Use it to trigger your mechanical friends to do their thing remotely, or hook your robotic canary up to an API and report the air quality in your neighbourhood.
Features
- Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W Aboard
- Dual Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 150Mhz with 520kB of SRAM
- 4MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
- Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
- 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 5.2
- Dual H-Bridge motor driver (DRV8833C)
- Per motor current limiting (425mA) *
- Per motor direction indicator LEDs **
- 2 JST-SH connectors (6 pin) for attaching motors with encoders (Pinout: M+, M-, 3v3, A, B, GND)
- 4 pin 0.1" connector for attaching two motors without encoders or a single small stepper
- 2 pin (Picoblade-compatible) connector for attaching speaker
- JST-PH (2 pin) connector for attaching battery (input voltage 2.5V - 5.5V***)
- 6 sets of header pins for connecting 3 pin hobby servos
- 6 sets of header pins for GPIO (3 of which are ADC capable)
- 12 x addressable RGB LEDs/Neopixels
- User button
- Reset button
- 2 x Qw/ST connectors for attaching breakouts
- Fully assembled
- No soldering required
- Programmable with MicroPython
Motors, servos, batteries and speakers are sold separately.
Getting Started
Our MicroPython libraries make it easy to get to grips with Inventor's hardware. You can download the latest Inventor 2350 W firmware at the link below. Copy the '-with-filesystem' .uf2 to your board to get the examples pre-loaded!
Connecting Breakouts
Inventor 2350 W has two Qw/ST (AKA Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connectors, so you can connect up Qw/ST breakouts easily using JST-SH to JST-SH cables.
Notes
- Measurements: 52mm x 66mm x 12mm (L x W x H). The mounting holes are M2.5 and 2.7mm in from each edge.
- * The current limit of each motor can be disabled by soldering the "high current" pads on the rear. The maximum supported output current when unlimited is 0.7 A continuous (1 A peak) per motor.
- ** The direction indicators for each motor can be disabled by cutting the "motor LED" traces on the rear.
- *** The battery voltage range is dependent on what functions you're using! Minimum voltages from our testing:
- Motor driver stops working below about 2.9V
- Audio stops working below about 2.2V
- Pico stops working below about 1.9V
- Max battery voltage is 5.5V, though we have powered from 5.6V, meaning rechargeable NiMH 4xAA packs can be used.
- You can have a battery and USB connected at the same time safely. The board will use whichever power source has the higher voltage (usually USB).
- Inventor 2350 W doesn't have battery charging circuitry onboard (this is so it's safe to use with either alkaline or LiPo batteries). You'll need an external LiPo charger (like LiPo Amigo) to charge the battery.
- If encoder motors are not being used, then four extra GPIO (16, 17, 18, 19) are available via the pads at the bottom edge of the board, in between the Qw/ST connectors and 0.1" motor connector.
About RP2350
The RP2350 chip is the Double Quarter Pounder & Fries to the RP2040's Double Cheeseburger and can have one or more RISC-V burgers instead of either of the M33 ARMs, to stretch the metaphor.
In addition to the modern M33 ARM cores, there are sides of: more PIO capability, a variety of low power states for sipping electrons, a whole security system and some sprinklings of specialist digital video circuits to offload DVI/HDMI output.
You can expect a tasty boost in performance - our "real world" MicroPython tests are running up to 2x faster compared to RP2040, and floating point number crunching in C/C++ is up to 20x faster. The extra on-chip RAM will make a big difference when performing memory intensive operations (such as working with higher resolution displays) and even more can be added thanks to external PSRAM support.
RP2350 comes in two flavours - A (standard) and B (all the pins). The B chip has a stonking 48 usable GPIO pins, including 8 ADCs and 24 PWMs, and features on some of our new products.