Raspberry Pi Pico

Pico. © Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The Raspberry Foundation has released its first microcontroller product. Priced at just 4 dollars, the Raspberry Pi Pico is built on the RP2040, a brand new chip developed by the Foundation itself. The advantages of the microcontroller are its low power consumption, analog inputs, flexible, low-latency I/O and small size. Up to now, the Foundation had been unable to offer a decent microcontroller-class product on its own. To develop the Pico, it first had to learn to fabricate its own chips, and the RP2040 is the fruit of its new know-how. The new chip includes a dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ running at 133MHz, 264KB of RAM, a DMA controller and support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory through a dedicated QSPI bus. The Raspberry Pi Pico pairs the RP2040 with 2MB of on-board Flash memory and 1.8-5.5V power supply chip input support. This means you can power your Pico from several different sources, including two or three AA batteries in series, or a single lithium-ion battery. The Pico exposes 26 of its 30 GPIO pins, including three of the four analog inputs. Of course, it comes with comprehensive documentation and user guidance so everyone can get started on microcontrollers. The Foundation has struck several partnerships to develop accessories for the Pico and boards using the RP2040. For example, it teamed up with Pimoroni to develop an adorable miniature game console based on the Pico.

⇨ YouTube, “Raspberry Pi Pico: your new $4 microcontroller.”

⇨ Tom’s Hardware, Les Pounder, “Raspberry Pi Pico review: ‘Pi silicon’ debuts on $4 microcontroller.”

2021-01-21