Description Adafruit Feather RP2040 SCORPIO

The Adafruit Feather RP2040 SCORPIO is specifically designed to drive NeoPixel (WS2812) LEDs. However, this module is also suitable for other projects that want to take advantage of the Feather pinout with 8 separate outputs (or inputs). The RP2040 PIO state machine is perfect for LED control. It can generate perfect waveforms with up to 8 simultaneous outputs, all via DMA. This means you don't have to use any CPU time to send the LED data out. Simply set the buffer and let the PIO peripheral send the data to the 8 outputs without delay. All while your code can continue to read buttons, play music, run CircuitPython, or do whatever else you like.

The SCORPIO has a clever pinout where all the standard Feather pins are the same as the GPIO pins. Plus the standard I2C, SPI, and UART lines. There are still enough pins left over to have 8 consecutive pins for PIO use on GPIO16 through GPIO23. To make NeoPixel use glitch free there is a 3V->5V level shifter so the output logic is 5V. If you want 3V signals you can adjust the shifter voltage with a jumper on the bottom. It is also possible to reverse the direction of the level shifter, so you can set all 8 I/O pins to be inputs.

The RP2040 SCORPIO has a lot of RAM, 264KB, making it easy to buffer large numbers of NeoPixels. In fact, there's so much RAM that you can even dither the pixels for finer brightness control. This is for better looking LEDs at low brightness, or for gamma correction. The NeoPXL8 driver code is available in Arduino and CircuitPython, so you can get started creating beautiful works of art powered by the Adafruit SCORPIO right out of the box.