Hacking Hardware McFly - an RP2040 board compatible with Picofly

Saliciae

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Introducing the Mcfly, a barebones RP2040 board designed from the ground up to be compact, simple and slim. With a USB port that breaks away after initial programming the overall thickness of the board can be reduced to 1.6mm. An X and Y footprint of ~19x19mm makes this stripped back board suitable for internal installation in the switch. No stone was left unturned in the design of this board, with all the features of a conventional rp2040 dev board present including a debug WS2812 LED and a lots of gpio broken out to as well as the inclusion of a 6 pin fpc connector. Despite the breakaway connector the Mcfly can be updated too, using a 5 pin 1.27mm header the usb section can be either temporarily soldered back on, or a pin header attached and it held in place whilst the board is reprogrammed.

1679485298938.png


Upon completion of testing the Mcfly will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence, opening the door for design improvements and alterations by the community, as well as commercialisation by a third party, at this moment i do not plan to commercialise this design myself, I simply dont have the time to sell these personally. If you would be interested in selling these or know someone who is please get in touch! This wont be price competitive with a 2040-Zero, in low quantities that's simply not possible.
The goal is for this to be a community driven open source solution that simplifies the rp2040 to the greatest extent possible whilst still being reasonably low cost and easy to assemble for all sorts of development tasks, using off the shelf parts you can get from any component retailer
1679485328787.png

As it stands the hardware layout is largely complete for now, pending feedback from testers, components have been ordered and the PCBs have also been ordered. I should recieve them in a week ish and can build a few.

If you have any questions or feedback ask away!
 
Last edited by Saliciae,

Saliciae

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Great Scott Marty you're a genius (hey someone must do a back to the future reference why not me?) anyways nice work now that I see the pic it vaguly reminds me of the picoPSU/DreamPSU for dreamcast,same board?
This is completely different, designed from scratch by me
 

Saliciae

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Saliciae

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Curious, do you need to "snap" the board and then do wires between them?
Once it's flashed you snap the board to detach the usb section. You don't need it for the board to function, it's only for programming. When you want to update the Mcfly, just solder a set of 1.27mm headers in the usb section and hold it in the corresponding header on the board
Post automatically merged:

Does the cpu fles need to be soldered onto the board?
CPU flex connects to the Mcfly through an FPC connector, the connector isn't in the rendering but will be in the BOM
 
Last edited by Saliciae,

kylaris

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Once it's flashed you snap the board to detach the usb section. You don't need it for the board to function, it's only for programming. When you want to update the Mcfly, just solder a set of 1.27mm headers in the usb section and hold it in the corresponding header on the board
Post automatically merged:
If it was going to be removed, why not just have 90 bent pins? or no pins at all and use a printed pin clip for programming?
 

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slaphappygamer

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This is really nice looking. One thought about the break away usb section. I never use my game cart slot and have a digital only library. Wonder it would be feasible to fit the game cart slot and place the usb in there. Probably use some type of ribbon cable to connect it. Maybe that would never work, but just a thought.
 

linuxares

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If it was going to be removed, why not just have 90 bent pins? or no pins at all and use a printed pin clip for programming?
Sadly this would require people to need to buy a programmer instead of a simple storage device as it is now
 

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