RP2040 And 5V Logic – Best Friends? This FX9000P Confirms!

Over the years, we’ve seen some modern microcontrollers turn out to be 5V-tolerant – now, RP2040 joins the crowd. Half a year ago, when we covered an ISA card based on a Pi Pico, [Eben Upton] left a comment saying that RP2040 is, technically, 5V tolerant for GPIO input purposes. The datasheets don’t state this because the reality of 5V tolerance isn’t the same as for natively 5V-tolerant chips – for instance, it doesn’t extend all the way to 5.5V for it to be ‘legally’ 5V-tolerant, as in, what 5V tolerance typically means when mentioned in a datasheet.

Having read that comment, [Andrew Menadue] has set out to test-drive the RP2040 GPIO capabilities, in a perfectly suited real-world scenario. He’s working with retro tech like Z80-era computers, using RP2040 boards for substituting entire RAM and ROM chips that have died in his FX9000P. Not only do the RP2040-driven replacements work wonders, using RP2040 boards also turns out to be way cheaper than sourcing replacements for chips long out of production!

Previously, [Andrew] used level shifter chips for interfacing the RP2040 with 5V systems, but he’s rebuilt a few designs of his without level shifters for the sake of this experiment. Now, he reports that, so far, those boards have been running long-term without problems. Together with [Eben]’s comment, this instills confidence in us when it comes to our RP2040 forays and 5V inputs.

There are a number of important caveats to this, that you should read up on. Some major points – certain GPIOs (like ADC ones) can’t take it, the GPIOs aren’t 5V-tolerant when set to output, and you shouldn’t feed the GPIOs 5V when the RP2040’s VDDIO is not powered up. [Andrew] points out one such case himself – one board of his has shed all level shifters except for the 8-bit address bus, which is driven by either the CPU or the RP2040 at different times, and that would result in 5V on an output-set GPIO when contention happens. All in all, if you’re working with 5V logic and your application is more hacking than business-critical stuff, you can shed the level shifters, too.

In the video, [Andrew] also shows some cool RP2040-based IC substitute boards – there’s followup videos on his channel and a GitHub repo if you’d like to learn more about them! All in all, this is a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one, making quick Pi Pico hacks even quicker, and a few RP2040 projects even easier to build – for instance, who knows, maybe that Pico-powered ISA card can shed its CPLD. It’s nice when we get an under-the-table statement with a technical elaboration – otherwise, we might need to break out the curve tracer, like [Avian] did when confirming the ESP8266 5V tolerance.