Picade Max USB Audio

by Pimoroni

Connect a pair of small speakers up to a Raspberry Pi (or other computer) easily with this RP2040-powered USB-C sound card/3W stereo amplifier.

We made this RP2040 board to drive the speakers on Picade Max, but we thought it might also be useful for other builds where you want to connect some speakers up over USB-C - especially since 3.5mm audio jacks are now starting to become somewhat of a rarity!

There are two screw terminals to connect the wires from your speakers, you'll need a 2mm or 2.5mm flat blade screwdriver for this. Once it's plugged into your computer, you may need to set this board as your default audio output device (in Raspberry Pi OS you can right click on the speaker in the menu bar).

Need some speakers? Check out the recommendations in the extras! >

Features

  • Powered by RP2040
    • Dual ARM Cortex M0+ with 264kB of SRAM
    • 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
  • 2 x screw terminals to attach speakers
  • I2S audio DAC with 3W stereo amplifier
  • Connector to add encoder for volume control
  • USB-C connector
  • Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector
  • Status LED
  • BOOT and RESET buttons
  • Fully-assembled (no soldering required)
  • C firmware
  • Schematic

About RP2040

Raspberry Pi's RP2040 microcontroller is a dual core ARM Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz. It bundles in 264kB of SRAM, 30 multifunction GPIO pins (including a four channel 12-bit ADC), a heap of standard peripherals (I2C, SPI, UART, PWM, clocks, etc), and USB support.

One very exciting feature of RP2040 is the programmable IOs which allow you to execute custom programs that can manipulate GPIO pins and transfer data between peripherals - they can offload tasks that require high data transfer rates or precise timing that traditionally would have required a lot of heavy lifting from the CPU.