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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: 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!