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Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit

posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 22 2021, @12:31AM   Printer-friendly

canopic jug writes:

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).

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  • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Friday January 22 2021, @01:53AM (2 children)

    by stormreaver (5101) on Friday January 22 2021, @01:53AM (#1103598)

    I started dipping my (very busy) toes into microcontrollers last year with the Arduino. How does attaching an accelerometer to a pico compare to doing the same thing with the Arduino? Easier, harder, about the same?

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  • (Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Friday January 22 2021, @04:05AM (1 child)

    by KilroySmith (2113) on Friday January 22 2021, @04:05AM (#1103623)

    This is brand-new, so hooking up an accelerometer will be more difficult. For the Arduino, it's as simple as ordering an Arduino-compatible accelerometer off Amazon, then using the provided libraries to read it. For the Pico, you'll have to figure out which pins to connect to the accelerometer, then you may need to write your own code to read the accelerometer. In a year or so, I'd expect the answer to change, and the two to be more-or-less equivalent.

    • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Friday January 22 2021, @04:02PM

      by stormreaver (5101) on Friday January 22 2021, @04:02PM (#1103782)

      Thanks for the answer. I suspected that would be the case. It sounds like a whole ton of fun, if only I had the time.