The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced the Raspberry Pi Pico, the company’s first microcontroller. Like other Raspberry Pi products, the new Raspberry Pi Pico is incredibly affordable at only $ 4, but it contains the Foundation’s first custom chip: the RP2040.
In designing the RP2040, the Raspberry Pi Foundation set three goals for itself. They wanted the disk to have high performance to handle integer workload, have flexible I / O options to support most external devices, and that it was cheaper to lower the access limit. What they designed measures two square millimeters, is manufactured on a 40nm process node, and features a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0 + processor with 264 KB of RAM on the chip. The 7 x 7 mm QFN-56 package also includes multiple I / O options, 2 MB flash memory, a power source that supports 1.8-5.5 V input voltages, a single pushbutton and a single LED.
RP2040 Specifications
- Dual core arm Cortex-M0 + @ 133MHz
- 264 KB (remember kilobytes?) RAM on disk
- Support for up to 16 MB off-chip flash memory via a dedicated QSPI bus
- DMA Administrator
- Interpolator and integer peripherals
- 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analog 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
The Raspberry Pi Pico is programmable in C / C ++ and MicroPython, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation provides a complete C SDK, GCC-based tool chain, and Visual Studio Code integration. Interestingly, there is even a port of TensorFlow Lite available, if you want to run any machine learning programs on the Pico.
For $ 4, the Raspberry Pi Pico with its RP2040 chip has a lot to offer. If you want to build a simple project at home to control your devices, it seems like the Pi Pico is a simple and inexpensive way to work with microcontroller programming.
You can see the full specifications of the board, datasheet, readout diagram, boot ROM on the device and other documentation on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has also put together a book to teach beginners how to get started with MicroPython on the new Pi Pico. You can buy the Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontroller and the book from today at all Raspberry Pi approved retailers. If you are a subscriber of HackSpace magazine you get a Pico for free with the February issue.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is a $ 4 microcontroller board with Raspberry’s internal, ARM-based RP2040 chip. It is programmable in C and MicroPython and has I / O options such as I2C, SPI and PIO.
Alternatively, you can pick up one of the other low-cost boards from Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni or Sparkfun using the RP2040 silicone platform.