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Raspberry Pi Announces RP2040 Chips For $1
Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon.
[...] The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced they have shipped over 600k Raspberry Pi Pico boards this year and orders for another 700k. More creators and other businesses meanwhile have been seeking to build out their own wares using the RP2040 chip, which has now led the group to offering the chip for $1 USD in single-unit sales. By this autumn they expect "serious volume" of the RP2040 chips for those looking to build out their own wares with this tasty silicon.
Raspberry Silicon update: RP2040 on sale now at $1
Also at CNX Software. Alasdair Allan says:
Today's announcement is for single unit quantity only. We're still figuring out what reel-scale pricing will look like in the autumn, but we expect it to be significantly lower than that.
Previously: Raspberry Pi Releases "Pico" Microcontroller at $4 Per Unit
Raspberry Pi Users Mortified as Microsoft Repository that Phones Home is Added to Pi OS
(Score: 5, Funny) by Frosty Piss on Wednesday June 02 2021, @05:23AM (1 child)
Shipping. They get you on the shipping.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:53PM
Both funny and true. Shipping and handling will probably be a lot more then $1, or is it perhaps it includes that in the dollar (I doubt that). That said you could probably order them from AliExpress etc and it will be free shipping if you buy a couple of them -- which you probably will do anyway since most people just don't order one when it comes to components, unless it's some very rare or expensive one but even then I would normally order at least a couple in case it breaks or is defective etc.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by engblom on Wednesday June 02 2021, @11:22AM (3 children)
Even with this price drop I would get ESP32 at any time before RP2040. With RP2040 I would have to solder on the header myself and I would lack both wifi and bluetooth. I do not know what RP2040 would cost shipped, but ESP32 can be had for about 3.50 EUR shipped, so they are in the same price range. ESP32 has been around longer so it also got community support.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 02 2021, @11:37AM
This is technically not a price drop, just the chip without the Pico board.
It will brute force its way into products with the Raspberry Pi hype machine despite being more expensive and lacking wireless.
More interesting will be what they do with the Zero lineup within the next few years. Competitors went to quad-core Cortex-A7 in the $10-20 range. It might be worth waiting for nodes like "12nm" to get cheap.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday June 02 2021, @11:43AM (1 child)
The $1 price is for the individual microcontroller chips, not a whole board built around it. The individual chips, or reels of chips, are for the hardcore board makers who are designing and building their own board. The boards with setups like you describe for the ESP32 would be for the third-parties to develop. Those can have WiFi or Bluetooth or other extra hardware. See Adafruit [adafruit.com], Arduino [arduino.cc], Sparkfun [sparkfun.com], or Pimoroni [pimoroni.com], each of which have their own boards based on the RP2040. There's not a wide selection, but there are already quite a few and the count is growing.
If you only need a single thread at any given time, then the ESP32 might be the better choice. The selling point of the RP2040 is that you can have two threads at the same time. There are some use-cases where that is very good to have. However, that uses a bit more electricity so it is a tradeoff.
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:57PM
Sure it's the cost for the one ship. But it's nice for those that build or order their own pcb:s and naturally it won't include other components. That said I doubt the quite small board and the few extra components and connectors will be or amount to much. Add a couple of dollars more for the compete board at most I would say. Apparently three extra bucks if you order the entire Pi Pico for the grand total sum of $4, which I gather include the work and all components etc. Give it some time and they'll be even cheaper then that.
But I still find it nice that they offer this so that you can infact make your own or in most cases I guess just perhaps solder your own from some github project where you just grab the gurbers and bom and then do the work yourself.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday June 03 2021, @01:52PM
$1 is a pretty darn awesome price for the specs. That's low-end AVR and MSP430 territory with a magnitude more power. Before the shortages, an original ST32F103CBT8 would set you back $3.50. It's only the Chinese clones that have a single 100 MHz class ARM at that price in that format. Even the original ESP32 ran way over that price. The GD32 is $5 at LCSC atm, and it's smaller 101 sibling is at around $1.
Unsorted thoughts:
- I like the STM32F103CBT6 format despite its shortcomings (no USB+CAN at the same time and such), because of the clones. ST try to push their newer versions, but the words "second source" have an immense ring to it, even if you have to cater for some minor software differences.
- The established manufacturers have a huge inventory of different SKUs. Like four generations of three power/performance classes, each with three feature categories (which would be 36 different dies), two bins for memory, and eight packages (for a total of 576 SKUs). Near impossible to navigate, and you need departments full of people to keep track of those. RPi have ONE chip (so far). The charm of having to avoid choices is strong (hence the popularity of the STM32F103CBT6 in LQFP48 or the ATmega328P in PDIP28), and you can be sure that these formats won't be end-of-lifed anytime, like the venerable Z80 or 8051 in PDIP40.
- Espressif with the ESP32 class is a bit torn up in the Tensilica-to-RISC-V move. It's a bit of a mishmash now, with the RISC-V side not having a convincing dual-core offering yet. Espressif will still rule anything with radio.
- If the taped 1000u price drops to, say 60 cents each, there will be only space for obscure Chinese 8- or 16-bit controllers with datasheets in Mandarin below it. One of them will make it big.
- 8051, Arduino AVR and Bluepill STM will continue for quite a while through momentum.
- ATSAMs might still be convincing in a 5V environment, although $1 plus level shifters is cheaper.
- The RP2040 has no flash. That's extra. I think it's an acceptable choice, because it allows to fit something tailored to an application. The argument of driving up cost through adding to the BOM isn't valid anymore, if it ever was. The process effort of putting flash on a die is certainly larger than a single extra pick&place. If you watch decapping nerd porn, you'll have seen the Chinese flip-flash tacked on die-to-die on one of the STM clones to get around flash-on-uC issues. (*)
- Work on the QFN56 is challenging, although a WSBGA would be worse. You'll have to watch a few Louis Rossmann videos to lose your fear. Thankfully, less ambitious amateurs have the Pi Pico at hand. :)
- I'm suspicious of the RPi organization. They have their Broadcom heritage and play dirty. That's a HUGE hurdle to a design win for me. Still, if you do your project on a non-cloud, non-M$ toolchain, the RP2040 does what it is supposed to, and all you need then is continuous supply, you're probably set. Unless they wait until they have a billion units in the field and then, after taking $10bn from MS, "improve user experience and IoT security" by changing their ROM to only boot-load images cloud-signed by "their" MS toolchain.
(*) haha. read that sentence to a member of the general population!