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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: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Friday January 22 2021, @09:21PM (4 children)

    by Rich (945) on Friday January 22 2021, @09:21PM (#1103926) Journal

    The Youtube algorithm just suggested a video "BBC Micro emulation on a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico" to me. Looks faithful. They show "Elite". Does that count in place of "Star Raiders" for now? I would bet that an Atari 8-bit emulation already is in the works somewhere, so Star Raiders might not be that far away.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 22 2021, @09:40PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday January 22 2021, @09:40PM (#1103932)

    The trick in Atari 8 bit emulation is the GTIA and sound chips - not that they're hard to emulate, just that they are rather specialized. In GTIA there's also the question: do you emulate the bugs that were in the majority of GTIA chips shipped, or do you emulate the design and later bug-fixed chips that shipped toward the end of the product run? I don't think there were many instances of the GTIA bugs being used to do intentional things. I know I designed a program to the documentation and it had a flicker-bug on the 800s & 400s that I couldn't explain (or fix) until the next gen 1200 computers came out with a fixed GTIA that my program worked perfectly on.

    --
    Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end

    • (Score: 2) by Rich on Friday January 22 2021, @10:54PM (2 children)

      by Rich (945) on Friday January 22 2021, @10:54PM (#1103958) Journal

      Without looking, I would assume that MESS has all that figured out and in code comments. The interesting "new" task would be to get the Pico's PIO to precisely output the original video signal. Or, for Apple II or Mac emulation emulate the Wozmachine, so you can directly hook up the floppy mechanisms. Or, because these cause hassle, have another pico that emulates the floppy mechanism, too, with fast SD card backend storage on the quad SPI. Or, for the C64 do the SID with an external analog filter. If you bring enough time, the nerd fun can be endless. :)

      • (Score: 2) by Rich on Friday January 22 2021, @11:08PM

        by Rich (945) on Friday January 22 2021, @11:08PM (#1103960) Journal

        Replying to myself here, because I just thought of one more useful retro project (as useful as retro stuff is, anyway): Have an interface that picks up all sort of vintage video signals from original devices and translates it to "modern" digital video, or at least VGA, because this is what many monitors still understand. Chances are that the original monitor just crapped out when you want to try that original (or originally emulated) vintage gear. Bonus points for a knob that dials in vintage TV artifacts. (But spare us the 50 Hz flicker of PAL!)

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 23 2021, @04:20AM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday January 23 2021, @04:20AM (#1104080)

        But who has an analog television to use as a monitor anymore?

        I know the rubber belts in all my floppy drives disintegrated 10+ years ago.

        Much better to emulate to an HDMI out and SD storage.

        --
        Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end