Waveshare RP2040-Zero Development Board, Without Header, USB-C

The Waveshare RP2040-Zero shrinks the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip down into a genuinely tiny Pico-style board, using a USB Type-C connector rather than the Micro-USB found on the original Pico, a welcome modernization for anyone who's standardized their cable drawer around USB-C. This version ships without headers, meaning the builder solders their own pin headers, wires, or directly mounts the board onto a carrier PCB using its castellated edge pads, which both keeps the cost down and gives flexibility in how the board gets integrated into a final project.

At its core is the dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ RP2040 chip running up to 133MHz, the same chip used in the original Raspberry Pi Pico, with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of onboard flash. An ME6217 LDO voltage regulator rated at 800mA supplies clean 3.3V power to the board's logic, and boot and reset buttons are both present directly on the board, alongside an onboard RGB LED for status indication or simple visual feedback without wiring up a separate LED.

29 multi-function GPIO pins are broken out, along with 8 Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines, letting custom peripheral protocols be implemented directly in software rather than relying solely on the chip's fixed hardware peripherals. Drag-and-drop programming via USB mass storage keeps the development workflow simple, the same approach used across the whole Pico-family of boards, and castellated module edges mean the whole board can be reflow-soldered directly onto a larger custom PCB design for a finished product, not just used as a breadboard-and-wires prototype.

Developers wanting the smallest possible RP2040 footprint, with the option to solder it permanently onto a custom carrier board, and who don't need the pre-installed headers a standard Pico ships with, will find the RP2040-Zero's compact size and castellated edges a genuinely useful design for space-constrained final products.