Add extra Storage to the Raspberry Pi Pico with W25Q128 and LittleFS

The RP2040 Pico board comes with 2 MByte onboard FLASH memory. While this is plenty of space for many embedded applications, sometimes it needed to have more storage space. Having the ability to adding an extra SPI FLASH memory with a useful file system comes in handy in such situations. This makes the RP2040 ideal for data logger applications or otherwise store a large amount of data. In this article I’ll show you how to add an extra 16 MByte of memory to the Raspberry Pi Pico board, running FreeRTOS, a command line shell and using LittleFS as the file system.

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Driver and Command Line Shell for Winbond W25Q128 16MByte Serial FLASH Device

Modern microcontroller come with plenty of internal FLASH memory. On the other side, many high performance MCUs as the NXP i.MX RT are ‘flashless’, because the silicon process for high performance cores is not matching the FLASH memory technology, so they are using external serial SPI or Quad-SPI (QSPI) memory instead.

Winbond w25q128 breakout board

Winbond w25q128 Serial Flash Breakout Board

Why not using an external SPI FLASH for a ‘normal’ microcontroller too?

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