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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: 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.
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(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.