Raspberry Pi introduces new $ 4 board and its own silicon

The Raspberry Pi is one of the smallest and cheapest minicomputers you can buy. It has an HDMI port, USB ports, and runs Ubuntu or other open source operating systems like a champ. New Raspberry Pi Pico, on the other hand, is like the processor of a more complex machine. In itself there is little he can do, but with a few add-ons, you can control bots, lights, and other DIY hacks.

The best thing? It only costs $ 4.

These things are not new. There is a lot of Arduino microcontrollers for rapid prototyping, including Adafruit Feather platform of boards and accessories. This is a first for RaspPi, however, and it’s an interesting move, not only because it puts it more firmly in competition with Arduino, but because it also features Raspberry Pi’s first foray into manufacturing. its own chips. The board uses the new RP2040 chip from Raspberry Pi, which consists of an Arm Cortex-M0 + processor with 264 KB of internal RAM. It also supports flash memory storage up to 16MB.

According to Raspberry Pi Craised Operating Officer James Adams, the company started work on its new chip in 2016. It runs on a 40nm process and has two cores, which is not common in such a cheap board.

You program it in C and MicroPython and connect sensors and displays to the little wires on the sides. It is powered through a USB port. You can’t really play Doom over (again) but you can use it for electronics experiments and other prototyping activities that the Raspberry Pi is already famous for. And according to Adams, it could be the first in a new line of silicon-powered boards from Raspberry Pi.