Raspberry Pi Foundation moves into microcontrollers with the $4 Pi Pico using homegrown silicon
- Reference: 1611212409
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/01/21/pi_pico/
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Some 37 million Raspberry Pi computers have been sold to date, according to head honcho Eben Upton. And although hobbyists, educators, and industry pros have seen success in connecting the diminutive computer to the outside world, often the board is paired up with a microcontroller (something like an Arduino device springs to mind) to take care of analogue input, low-latency input/output or a low-power mode.
[1]
Even the power-sipping habits of the Pi Zero dwarfs that of a dedicated microcontroller.
The gang has therefore created the Pi Pico, built on the in-house-designed RP2040 system-on-chip.
[2]
There is a useful amount of gubbins within the 40nm silicon. Processing is taken care of by a dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133MHz. 264kB of on-chip RAM is also present as well as USB 1.1 and those handy general purpose IO pins (26 are exposed to the user of which three are analogue inputs). A variety of low-power modes should see extended operation from the device when running on battery power.
[3]
Anyone expecting the connectors seen on the board's larger siblings are, however, to be disappointed. The 21mm x 51mm board uses hole pads with castellated edges. As if to underline where this microcontroller might see the most use, it can also be purchased in 600-unit reels to fit into automated assembly lines.
Chief operating office James Adams told The Register : "We designed the silicon from scratch ourselves. The RP2040 chip has been a long time in the making – we started initial work at the back end of 2016, we had some test silicon in our hands in September 2018.
"We can fit everything on a low cost 2-layer PCB as the RP2040 chip pinout was designed alongside the Pico PCB – so you can see all the IO fan out perfectly to the edge pins and everything 'just fits'."
The Pico itself is built at Sony Inazawa, Japan.
For the power user, there is a C SDK and Visual Studio Code integration. The Cortex M0+ lacks a floating point unit so those math operations are handled in the SDK. A port of MicroPython has also been made, exposing the hardware (including the PIO subsystem) to tinkerers.
A plethora of development boards and projects based on the silicon have been announced alongside the Pico, including the Pimoroni Picosystem, a handheld game-making set, and the Adafruit Feather RP2040.
The [4]Raspberry Pi Pico itself can be found stuck to the cover of this month's HackSpace magazine.
As for the Pico's stablemates, Upton told us the [5]recently released Pi 400 has sold well – "pretty much everything we've made that isn't on a ship" – but also that the company was suffering from a "fatter downstream logistics chain than usual" due to the current environment. Shipping things by air was proving uneconomical due to a jump in air freight charges arising from last year's slump in passenger numbers.
[6]
And an 8GB version? No plans right now, but he had noted "some demand from the community" so never say never. ®
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Re: What a shame they didn't go down the RiscV route...
The exciting and unique bit is the PIO. Worth reading up on it. Dual core is also quite interesting.
Re: What a shame they didn't go down the RiscV route...
While I truly hope RiscV continues to gain traction, when the Pi was launched the philosophy of the company made ARM the way forward. They never set out to revolutionise the IT world (so many behind this project had already done that), they wanted to reopen it to everyone.
No WiFi?
It's only a microcontroller - and the expectation is presumably that it will be used alongside a 'real' Raspberry Pi to provide those low-latency, low-power, close-to-the-metal functions that make a microcomputer running a real-time OS stumble - but I'm surprised it doesn't have WiFi (or Bluetooth, or LoRa, or at least some sort of connectivity).
I'm seeing a lot of applications for ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers, rather than Atmel or Arm parts, simply because they DO provide on-package wireless connectivity. I do hope the Raspberry Pi foundation have a WiFi capable sibling of the RP2040 waiting in the wings.
Re: No WiFi?
At which point the power sipping stops.
Re: No WiFi?
At which point the power sipping stops.
Using WiFi obviously involves some consumption of power, having it available need not (until you need to use it).
ESP32 has good low-power and deep-sleep modes, for example.
Re: No WiFi?
Presumably with the WiFi off though? Cant see a Wake On WIfi being anywhere near as frugal as Wake On Lan
Re: No WiFi?
Adding WiFi (in any form) would greatly increase the complexity of the chip. I guess they could license a pre-designed module for inclusion, but that's a further complexity and cost.
It would be interesting though. Using the ESP32/8266 microcontrollers is handy partly because of the wireless connectivity.
Re: No WiFi?
For a microcontroller if you go the Arduino route you can get a WeMos D1 WiFi ESP8266 UNO ESP-12E IOT Development Board Arduino for £4.95 including postage.
Re: No WiFi?
AZ-Delivery have ESP8266 ESP with WiFi and USB Adapter, 3 for £10!
https://www.az-delivery.uk/products/esp8266-01s-mit-usb-adapter?variant=6119683162139
Put MicroPython on and off you go!
Yes WiFi!
Arduino have a R2040+WifiBlueTooth module [1]PCB already assembled. If you check out the [2]Raspberry Pi website you will find there are already several RP2040 based boards (somewhat?) ready.
[1] https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-the-world-of-microcontrollers/
[2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/
Re: No WiFi?
Could always put an ESP on the side, and power it from the pico... only power it when you need to send data serial -> wifi...
Interesting
I would have liked to see more analog ports. That would have been my main interest in this. At 12bit resolution, that's almost good enough for generating MIDI NRPNs - mind you, a lot of systems only actually resolve 10bit. Three ports gets you one joystick and one foot pedal.
I would also have liked USB2, although I suppose 1.1 would again be good enough for standard MIDI.
Neither fish nor fowl
So this is not a little Linux board. It isn't an Arduino or ESP32 either. Neither is it compatible with Arduino libraries. It needs a brand new IDE [1]by all accounts. The world is already running on any of the thousands of STMicro M0 boards out there.
So it is difficult to see what this addition to a crowded market has to offer - apart from the "Pi" branding.
Hobbyists are already well catered for and industrial users buy the chips by the million to integrate into their own devices (with the help of STM development tools).
[1] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/20/raspberry-pi-enters-microcontroller-game-with-4-pico/
Bubblegum micro that's not terrible in technical terms (nice speed, lots of RAM but external flash?) and a dev environment that looks to be targeted at Pi only (so far), no need for J-TAG adapters etc
Hmm, curate's egg....
Documentation looks great and I don't think it'll be long before the IDE goes cross platform, the price is good for what you get, yeah, I've ordered a couple and will tinker while watching with interest.
What a shame they didn't go down the RiscV route...
Nothing really exciting here. This segment is crowded with consumer grade stuff. Would have been interesting if they had decided to use RiscV a couple of years ago - at least the foundation could open source the design.