Raspberry Pi Announces RP2040 Chips For $1
Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon.
[...] The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced they have shipped over 600k Raspberry Pi Pico boards this year and orders for another 700k. More creators and other businesses meanwhile have been seeking to build out their own wares using the RP2040 chip, which has now led the group to offering the chip for $1 USD in single-unit sales. By this autumn they expect "serious volume" of the RP2040 chips for those looking to build out their own wares with this tasty silicon.
Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1
Also at CNX Software. Alasdair Allan says:
Today's announcement is for single unit quantity only. We're still figuring out what reel-scale pricing will look like in the autumn, but we expect it to be significantly lower than that.
Previously: Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit
Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation's first microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico is now on sale at $4. Raspberry Pi is normally associated with single board microcomputers. This microcontroller uses the RP2040 dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ chip. The board has support for C, C++, and microPython.
We had three principal design goals for RP2040: high performance, particularly for integer workloads; flexible I/O, to allow us to talk to almost any external device; and of course, low cost, to eliminate barriers to entry. We ended up with an incredibly powerful little chip, cramming all this into a 7 × 7 mm QFN-56 package containing just two square millimetres of 40 nm silicon. RP2040 has:
- Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
- 264KB (remember kilobytes?[*]) of on-chip RAM
- Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
- DMA controller
- Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
- 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
- 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers
- 16 × PWM channels
- 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
- 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
- USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming
And this isn't just a powerful chip: it's designed to help you bring every last drop of that power to bear. With six independent banks of RAM, and a fully connected switch at the heart of its bus fabric, you can easily arrange for the cores and DMA engines to run in parallel without contention.
[*] By comparison, the Apple II computer (introduced in June 1977) had: 4-48 KiB of RAM, a 6502 processor (running at 1 MHz), and an Introductory price of US$1,298 (equivalent to $5,476 in 2019).
Additional coverage:
Several sites are covering an incident affecting Raspberry Pi OS deployments since last week. Quietly, without disclosure or warning, a package added a Microsoft repository and OpenPGP key to the system. The latter effectively gives the former full root access, in principle, to the whole system. The former checks in with Microsoft's servers any time APT refreshes its cache.
$ grep -i pretty /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"How to know if you're affected/infected already:
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf] http://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code
stable main
Issue has been taken with both what has been done and how it has been deployed. The official explanation is, for now, that resource hog Visual Studio was to be made available by default on the Raspberry Pi for development for their first entry into microcontrollers, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This is in spite of the established presence of many light weight editors and IDEs alredy[sic] available through vetted repositories. Not to mention the package could have been added to the established, vetted repositories. Threads on the topic over at the Raspberry Pi Forum are quickly locked by moderators and then deleted.
- TechRights. Raspberry Pi (at Least Raspbian GNU/Linux and/or Raspberry Pi Foundation) Appears to Have Been Infiltrated by Microsoft and There Are Severe Consequences
- TechRights. Raspberry Pi Foundation is Trying to Cover Up Its Deal With the Devil by Censoring Its Own Customers
- CyberCity. Heads up: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi's Linux OS
- Hot Hardware. Raspberry Pi Users Mortified As Microsoft Repository That Phones Home Is Added To Pi OS
- The Linux Gamer. Microsoft INFILTRATES Raspberry Pi OS
Although initially expecting to only sell a few thousand units, the Raspberry Pi has sold more than 40 million computers to date. Over time it has developed quite a fan base. Part of cultivating that base has been through a dedicated blog and help forum. The Raspberry Pi blog and forum have now turned 10 years old.
We’ve kept every single blog post we’ve ever written up on this site, starting way back in July 2011. Ten years is a long time in internet terms, so you’ll find some dead links in some earlier posts; and this website has undergone a number of total redesigns, so early stuff doesn’t tend to have the pretty thumbnail associated with it to show you what it’s all about. (Our page design didn’t use them back then.) But all the same, for the internet archeologists among you, or those interested in the beginnings of Raspberry Pi, those posts from before we even had hardware are worth flicking through.
There are two organizations involved. Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, etc. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.
Previously:
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2021) The Ongoing Raspberry Pi Fiasco
(2021) Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
(2020) Raspberry Pi: We're Making it Easier to Build Our Devices into Your Hardware
(2020) Raspberry Pi 400: Its Designer Reveals More About the Faster Pi 4 in the $70 PC's Keyboard
The Telegraph reports that Raspberry Pi Trading has offloaded stakes to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust in a move that values the operation at around $500m. Most manufacturing is able to be done in the UK, and last year's sales amounted to 7.1m units for a profit of £11.4m.
Lansdowne Partners' presence in the list of investors is less surprising than Ezrah Charitable Trust. The latter was founded by former Goldman Sachs vice-president and Farallon Capital Management partner David Cohen in 2016 to focus "on the poorest of the poor, especially in Africa" – an indicator that it may be the work of the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation that was of interest.
The Register mentions that the foundation's 2020 financials show an income of over £95.8m, up nearly double from the £49.5m it reported in 2019.
Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, and so on. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.
Previously:
(2021) Two New Microcontroller Boards Released with Built In Displays
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2020) Raspberry Pi 4 Gets 8 GB RAM Model, Also 64-bit OS and USB Boot (Both in Beta)
and more.
Raspberry Pi Pico W Launches For $6
The Raspberry Pi Pico W is an update to last year's Raspberry Pi Pico using their in-house RP2040 silicon. The Pico W is a small update to this IoT platform that has already sold more than two million boards.
With the Raspberry Pi Pico W, there is now 802.11n wireless networking added to the Pico platform to make it more attractive for IoT use-cases. The Pico W retains pin compatibility with the original Pico. The Pico W makes use of an Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip.
Aside from the addition of 802.11n wireless networking, the Pico W is the same platform as the Pico. Rather than $4, this 802.11n WiFi variant will sell for $6 USD.
Also launching are two versions with pre-soldered headers:
Pico H ($5) and Pico WH ($7) add pre-populated headers, and our new 3-pin debug connector, to Pico and Pico W respectively. Pico H and Pico W are available today; Pico WH will follow in August.
[...] Eagle-eyed readers of datasheets will notice that CYW43439 supports both Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low-Energy: we have not enabled Bluetooth on Pico W at launch, but may do so in the future.
Previously: Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit
Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(Score: 5, Funny) by Frosty Piss on Wednesday June 02 2021, @05:23AM (1 child)
Shipping. They get you on the shipping.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:53PM
Both funny and true. Shipping and handling will probably be a lot more then $1, or is it perhaps it includes that in the dollar (I doubt that). That said you could probably order them from AliExpress etc and it will be free shipping if you buy a couple of them -- which you probably will do anyway since most people just don't order one when it comes to components, unless it's some very rare or expensive one but even then I would normally order at least a couple in case it breaks or is defective etc.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by engblom on Wednesday June 02 2021, @11:22AM (3 children)
Even with this price drop I would get ESP32 at any time before RP2040. With RP2040 I would have to solder on the header myself and I would lack both wifi and bluetooth. I do not know what RP2040 would cost shipped, but ESP32 can be had for about 3.50 EUR shipped, so they are in the same price range. ESP32 has been around longer so it also got community support.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 02 2021, @11:37AM
This is technically not a price drop, just the chip without the Pico board.
It will brute force its way into products with the Raspberry Pi hype machine despite being more expensive and lacking wireless.
More interesting will be what they do with the Zero lineup within the next few years. Competitors went to quad-core Cortex-A7 in the $10-20 range. It might be worth waiting for nodes like "12nm" to get cheap.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday June 02 2021, @11:43AM (1 child)
The $1 price is for the individual microcontroller chips, not a whole board built around it. The individual chips, or reels of chips, are for the hardcore board makers who are designing and building their own board. The boards with setups like you describe for the ESP32 would be for the third-parties to develop. Those can have WiFi or Bluetooth or other extra hardware. See Adafruit [adafruit.com], Arduino [arduino.cc], Sparkfun [sparkfun.com], or Pimoroni [pimoroni.com], each of which have their own boards based on the RP2040. There's not a wide selection, but there are already quite a few and the count is growing.
If you only need a single thread at any given time, then the ESP32 might be the better choice. The selling point of the RP2040 is that you can have two threads at the same time. There are some use-cases where that is very good to have. However, that uses a bit more electricity so it is a tradeoff.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:57PM
Sure it's the cost for the one ship. But it's nice for those that build or order their own pcb:s and naturally it won't include other components. That said I doubt the quite small board and the few extra components and connectors will be or amount to much. Add a couple of dollars more for the compete board at most I would say. Apparently three extra bucks if you order the entire Pi Pico for the grand total sum of $4, which I gather include the work and all components etc. Give it some time and they'll be even cheaper then that.
But I still find it nice that they offer this so that you can infact make your own or in most cases I guess just perhaps solder your own from some github project where you just grab the gurbers and bom and then do the work yourself.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday June 03 2021, @01:52PM
$1 is a pretty darn awesome price for the specs. That's low-end AVR and MSP430 territory with a magnitude more power. Before the shortages, an original ST32F103CBT8 would set you back $3.50. It's only the Chinese clones that have a single 100 MHz class ARM at that price in that format. Even the original ESP32 ran way over that price. The GD32 is $5 at LCSC atm, and it's smaller 101 sibling is at around $1.
Unsorted thoughts:
- I like the STM32F103CBT6 format despite its shortcomings (no USB+CAN at the same time and such), because of the clones. ST try to push their newer versions, but the words "second source" have an immense ring to it, even if you have to cater for some minor software differences.
- The established manufacturers have a huge inventory of different SKUs. Like four generations of three power/performance classes, each with three feature categories (which would be 36 different dies), two bins for memory, and eight packages (for a total of 576 SKUs). Near impossible to navigate, and you need departments full of people to keep track of those. RPi have ONE chip (so far). The charm of having to avoid choices is strong (hence the popularity of the STM32F103CBT6 in LQFP48 or the ATmega328P in PDIP28), and you can be sure that these formats won't be end-of-lifed anytime, like the venerable Z80 or 8051 in PDIP40.
- Espressif with the ESP32 class is a bit torn up in the Tensilica-to-RISC-V move. It's a bit of a mishmash now, with the RISC-V side not having a convincing dual-core offering yet. Espressif will still rule anything with radio.
- If the taped 1000u price drops to, say 60 cents each, there will be only space for obscure Chinese 8- or 16-bit controllers with datasheets in Mandarin below it. One of them will make it big.
- 8051, Arduino AVR and Bluepill STM will continue for quite a while through momentum.
- ATSAMs might still be convincing in a 5V environment, although $1 plus level shifters is cheaper.
- The RP2040 has no flash. That's extra. I think it's an acceptable choice, because it allows to fit something tailored to an application. The argument of driving up cost through adding to the BOM isn't valid anymore, if it ever was. The process effort of putting flash on a die is certainly larger than a single extra pick&place. If you watch decapping nerd porn, you'll have seen the Chinese flip-flash tacked on die-to-die on one of the STM clones to get around flash-on-uC issues. (*)
- Work on the QFN56 is challenging, although a WSBGA would be worse. You'll have to watch a few Louis Rossmann videos to lose your fear. Thankfully, less ambitious amateurs have the Pi Pico at hand. :)
- I'm suspicious of the RPi organization. They have their Broadcom heritage and play dirty. That's a HUGE hurdle to a design win for me. Still, if you do your project on a non-cloud, non-M$ toolchain, the RP2040 does what it is supposed to, and all you need then is continuous supply, you're probably set. Unless they wait until they have a billion units in the field and then, after taking $10bn from MS, "improve user experience and IoT security" by changing their ROM to only boot-load images cloud-signed by "their" MS toolchain.
(*) haha. read that sentence to a member of the general population!