If you've not been on the socials this morning - or if your social feed looks very different to mine - there's a new Raspberry Pi in town: the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller, powered by the company's first in-house silicon chip the RP2040. It's exciting stuff - and third party boards based on the same RP2040 are already en-route. But better still: I has a new book, Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico: The Official Guide. As usual, it's free to download under a Creative Commons licence, so maybe have a shufti?
It's a microcontroller, like the Arduino Nano, but considerably more powerful. The Nano's got an eight-bit ATmega328 running at 16MHz with 2kB of SRAM and 32kB of flash memory; the Pico's got a 32-bit dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ running at 133MHz (or higher, if you don't mind going outside spec) with 264kB of SRAM and 2MB of flash memory. Also, the Nano's €20 (cheaper clones abound, of course); the Pico's £3.60, or free on the cover of this month's HackSpace. Better still, the Pico's getting an Arduino core - so you'll be able to program it directly in the Arduino IDE, just like a Nano.
I found out about it first thing in an email from Pimoroni. Looks brilliant, GH and was delighted to see you had written the guide and get a thank you on the RPi site. Another great innovation for the foundation and a new family of boards
Are they planning on selling the processor at all? As we only use these board for prototyping before we make an embedded system, so if I can't get my hands on the MCU its nearly useless to me!
They certainly are: Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, and SparkFun are already building around it. No word on availability and pricing to those outside the Inner Circle yet, but it's absolutely on the cards - they've even written an entire databook all about building something with the RP2040. The RP2040 databook, meanwhile, is here - and a hefty tome it is too. The Pico's designed to be used as a module, too - hence the castellated pins. It arrives with the headers unpopulated, so you can just solder the thing direct to a carrier board with a minimal increase in Z height - basically the height of the micro-USB port. Oh, one thing to bear in mind: the RP2040 has no on-board non-volatile memory, so you'll need to include an external flash chip in your BOM.
Datasheet, not databook Well, depends on the price of the MCU, that is an interesting prosspect! The SOM is far too big for 99% of my use cases.The only SOM's I use are for RF stuff as it makes CE testing far easier if you're using CE certified RF SOM's
They've been using the terms interchangeably the whole time, and at humpty-tump hundred pages I'd say it qualifies as a book!
So like any other CM0+ based MCU, just with less and worse peripherals, worse documentation, no onboard flash and atrocious power consumption in powered down states (~1mA @ 5V in deep-sleep/DORMANT on CM0, srsly?). Will it even be available as discrete IC?
Whuh? It's got a 600-plus-page MCU datasheet, a 270-page C/C++ SDK guide, a 70-page C/C++ quickstart guide, a 28-page datasheet for the Pico, a 43 page Python SDK guide, and a 29 page guide on using the RP2040 in your own hardware designs - and my shiny new book. Oh, and the board designs for the Pico, a VGA carrier, and a minimum viable board are open source. You think that's worse documentation than rival microcontrollers? You be trippin'. Have you looked at the eight-state-machine PIO? If it lacks a peripheral you want, write it yourself. I've already seen someone give an RP2040 dual RGB HDMI outputs... Yes, as per:
ordered, my 13yr and 11yr olds are taking a big interest in anything pi related. and enjoy using your books
