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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:
- Raspberry Pi Enters Microcontroller Game With $4 Pico
- Raspberry Pi Pico, RP2040 and Adafruit family of boards
- The Raspberry Pi Pico is a new $4 microcontroller
- Raspberry Pi Pico, the first microcontroller released by Raspberry Pi Foundation, based on the new RP2040 MCU.
- Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller: specifications, features and RP2040
- Programming Raspberry Pi Pico with Python and MicroPython
- How to solder GPIO pin headers to Raspberry Pi Pico
- Raspberry Pi Pico FAQ
- Welcome Raspberry Pi to the world of microcontrollers
- Hello Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040!
- Happy Pico/RP2040 Day!
(Score: 4, Informative) by KilroySmith on Friday January 22 2021, @04:09AM
FreeRTOS would be an appropriate kernel for this type of device, with a footprint starting around 10KB depending on the services that you include. That won't include the kind of capabilities that you'd get in a Linux kernel, but if you need those kinds of capabilities I've heard that the Raspberry Pi organization might have a more appropriate board...