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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @12:50PM (4 children)
ESP32 costs the same and has tons more functionality. This thing's a dud.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @03:06PM
It can't even pull its weight against the no-radio STM32 offerings.
But don't worry, the Maker™ Marketing Cartel will ensure that Clickaday, Arsetechica, et.al. will promote it at every opportunity ...at the cost of other Educational projects like micro:bit. Nice one, RPF.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @06:06PM (1 child)
FYI: Looks like the ESP32 costs at least twice this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @10:21PM
Only if you're an idiot who doesn't know how to shop.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 23 2021, @04:59PM
I'd like to compare the dev environments.
ESP32 has interpreters like micropython and ulisp and that BASIC language environment, or great support for freertos and stuff like that.
In theory the Pi Pico could have similar stuff maybe in theory better stuff, but whats it got now?
For a couple bucks more I could get a zero with an excellent linux development environment and more IO.