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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 takyon on Friday January 22 2021, @08:14AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday January 22 2021, @08:14AM (#1103669) Journal

    http://linuxgizmos.com/rpi-zero-w-clone-offers-quad-core-power-for-15/ [linuxgizmos.com]
    https://www.notebookcheck.net/Orange-Pi-Zero2-The-Raspberry-Pi-Zero-alternative-is-finally-orderable.501626.0.html [notebookcheck.net]

    Why not? People run it as a desktop, media player, etc. Alternatives are going to quad-core (not the big cores of Pi4, obviously) at around $15.

    I didn't specify a time frame for doing it. Raspberry Pi Zero will remain in production until at least January 2026. They could launch a new version in 2025.

    Pico can take on SOME of the duties that Zero was used for. They can drop the non-wireless option and $5 price point for a Zero2.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @10:19AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @10:19AM (#1103689)

    RPi will always use HDMI as long as HDMI is the standard on TVs. It's important to them that a dedicated monitor is not required.

    USB-C sure, it's a better physical connector than other USB ports and can supply more power, but DisplayPort over USB-C is kind of a loopy idea to begin with and only found on high end hardware. And DisplayPort just isn't required.

    What this does is bring Raspberry Pi branding to a more powerful microcontroller than Arduino. The RPi has iffy GPIO and lots of CPU power, Arduino has good I/O but so little computation power that you can barely connect to networks with it. This will split the difference nicely.

    And it opens up the possibility of a RPi with both on board, a real RPi system with a microcontroller on the side for realtime I/O. The Beaglebone can do this but it's expensive and outdated. That would be pretty darn handy.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 22 2021, @01:22PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday January 22 2021, @01:22PM (#1103732) Journal

      Fine, HDMI Alt Mode [hdmi.org] over USB Type-C.

      RPi Zero has a mini-HDMI port. If they change it, it would be to micro-HDMI or USB Type-C. Choosing USB allows the port to be multi-use, choosing micro-HDMI allows reuse of cables that people bought for RPi 4B/5/???.

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