from the pi-day-must-have-come-early-this-year dept.
An overview, including specs, is available at tom's HARDWARE:
The Raspberry Pi Pico's "Pi Silicon" RP2040 SoC was the plentiful source of microcontroller brains during a long period of supply chain woes. It was natural for official partners (Adafruit, SparkFun, Arduino and Pimoroni) to release their own spins on the $4 microcontroller, and others including Banana Pi followed suit. For its latest model, the Banana Pi BPI-Pico-RP2040 we see the same 40 pin form factor but there are a few differences between the official Pico and Banana Pi's.
[...] Let's start with the price. Coming in at a MSRP of $6.58 (currently discounted to $5.26) the board is $2 more than an official Raspberry Pi Pico. For the additional dollars we get an onboard WS2812B "NeoPixel" RGB LED connected to GPIO3 (PDF) and a 4 pin JST-PH socket. This socket is more commonly referred to as Stemma QT, Qwiic or QW/ST and in reality it breaks out the I2C interface (I2C0 on pins GP8 and 9 to be specific) for use with compatible devices.
[...] More information on the Banana Pi BPI-Pico-RP2040 can be found via the official wiki. There are schematics and mechanical drawings for those of us eager to add the board to their next project. The board is on sale via Aliexpress.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday December 31, @07:15PM (2 children)
Price is not the only factor in deciding which SBC to purchase. While the Raspberry Pi has found a huge following in both industry and hobbyist communities, the main goal of the foundation is still to get inexpensive general-purpose computers into the hands of young people, especially kids. Thus their hardware is a bit more pricey than comparably spec'ed competing units because they plow much of that into educational programmes and materials. So there is more training material than you can shake a stick published by the RPF.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 31, @09:03PM
https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/12/28/banana-pi-bpi-pico-rp2040-raspberry-pi-pico-replica-gets-usb-c-port-i2c-connector-and-rgb-led/ [cnx-software.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Sunday January 01, @01:06PM
For me in addition, it is the ecosystem around the Raspberry pi (and the Arduino) that makes me use them. A lot of the other embedded systems may offer more features at a better price, but when you dig into them you find spotty documentation, out of date OS images (or no OS support for the OS you want to use), limited libraries and not much of a community online to ask for help.
With the RasbPi and Arduino, there is a huge amount of libraries, HW modules, example code and community support. Every major OS has been ported to the pi for example. As a result you can concentrate on solving the problems on your own project, rather than trying to get the low level stuff functioning first. That is worth paying a bit extra for on its own.
So I pretty much stick to the two above systems. They gained first mover advantage by offering SBCs to the masses, and (in the case of Arduino) simplifying embedded programming, and they did not squander that advantage as of yet.
Saying that, I have been seeing more "RISC V" SBCs showing up on Alibaba, and I'm getting tempted to buy one, primarily for trying out / the novelty of the new architecture.
(Score: 1) by GloomMower on Sunday January 01, @07:08PM
It basically is a raspberry pi pico, it uses the same RP2040.