Taking the project forward

So far, we have used the Pico as-is to develop our product. It is not practical to use the Pico development board for all designs. Some possible reasons are as follows:

• The size of the Pico board might not be suitable for your product.
• You might not need all the pins that are available on the Pico microcontroller.
• Compared to the Pico, an RP2040 microcontroller costs USD 1, but you do have additional components.

In the next section, we will discuss some options to replace the Raspberry Pi Pico in our design.

Replacing the Pico

To replace the Pico with a custom design based on the RP2040 microcontroller, we need to follow a reference design or an application note. Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi Foundation provides a document called Hardware design with RP2040 (available at https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/hardware-design-with-rp2040.pdf). The document details all the components that are needed for your design.

We will...