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 for just $ 4, but features the Foundation’s first custom chip: the RP2040.
When designing the RP2040, the Raspberry Pi Foundation set three goals for itself. They wanted the chip to deliver high performance to handle entire workloads, have flexible I / O options to support most external devices, and be inexpensive to lower the entry barrier. What they designed measures two square millimeters, is manufactured in a 40 nm process node and has an ARM Cortex-M0 + dual-core processor with 264 KB of RAM on the chip. Also included in the 7×7 mm QFN-56 package are several I / O options, 2 MB of flash memory, a power supply chip that supports 1.8-5.5 V input voltages, a single button and a single LED.
Specifications RP2040
- Dual-core Cortex-M0 + @ 133MHz arm
- 264 KB (remember kilobytes?) On-chip RAM
- Support for up to 16 MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
- DMA controller
- Interpolator peripherals and entire dividers
- 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 and PHY controller, 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 is providing a complete C SDK, GCC-based toolkit and integration with Visual Studio Code. Interestingly, there is even a TensorFlow Lite port available, in case you are interested in running a machine learning program on Pico.
For $ 4, the Raspberry Pi Pico with its RP2040 chip has a lot to offer. If you are looking to build a simple project at home to control your appliances, Pi Pico seems to be a simple and inexpensive way to get into microcontroller programming.
You can view the complete specifications for the card, data sheet, pinout diagram, boot ROM on the device and other documentation on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has also written a book to teach beginners how to start using MicroPython on the new Pi Pico. You can buy the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and the book starting today from all approved Raspberry Pi retailers. If you are a subscriber to HackSpace magazine, you will receive a free Pico with the February issue.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is a $ 4 microcontrolled card with Raspberry’s 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 purchase one of the other low-cost boards from Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni or Sparkfun that make use of the RP2040 silicon platform.