The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny $ 4 microcontroller running on the company’s own chip



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The tiny Raspberry Pi Foundation computers can be used for everything from homemade cameras to cucumber sorters, and now the group is branching out into microcontrollers and custom silicon. The Raspberry Pi Pico is the first step. It’s a new $ 4 microcontroller that’s smaller than the average Pi, featuring a custom chip powerful enough to be used in machine learning projects (according to The Raspberry Pi Foundation), and is on sale now. .

In its introductory blog post, the company explains that today’s Raspberry Pis are already often used with a smaller microcontroller:

The Raspberry Pi takes care of heavy calculations, network access and storage, while the microcontroller handles analog inputs and low latency I / O and, at times, provides very low power sleep mode.

The company now has one.

In a first for the microcomputer maker, the Pico is powered by an in-house designed custom chip called the RP2040. The Pico card includes the new chip, 2MB of flash memory, a clickable button and a Micro USB Type B port. Here are the full specifications of the RP2040:

Dual core Cortex-M0 + arm at 133 MHz

264 KB (remember the kilobytes?) Of on-chip RAM

Supports up to 16MB of off-chip flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus

DMA controller

Interpolator and integer divisor devices

30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analog inputs

2 × UART, 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 PIO state machines (programmable I / O)

USB mass storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag and drop programming

These specs can go in one ear and go out the other, but the best way to illustrate the potential of a new Raspberry Pi product is to see it used in something cool. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is partnering with companies like Arduino, Adafruit, and Pimoroni to integrate the new RP2040 chip into other boards and gadgets. There’s quite a list in the blog post announcing the Pico, but a few notable ones are Pimoroni’s PicoSystem gaming console, Adafruit’s Feather RP 2040 board, and the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is now available from approved resellers for $ 4. The microcontroller will also be offered free in the February issues of HackSpace Magazine.

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