March 29, 2024
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/raspberry-pi-foundation-launches-4-microcontroller-with-custom-chip/

Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico, a tiny little microcontroller that permits you to construct {hardware} initiatives with some code operating on the microcontroller. Much more fascinating, the Raspberry Pi Basis is utilizing its personal RP2040 chip, which implies that the inspiration is now making its personal silicon.

If you happen to’re not conversant in microcontrollers, these gadgets allow you to management different elements or different gadgets. You would possibly suppose that you would be able to already do this sort of stuff with a regular Raspberry Pi. However microcontrollers are particularly designed to work together with different issues.

They’re low cost, they’re small and so they draw little or no energy. You can begin growing your challenge with a breadboard to keep away from soldering. You may pair it with a small battery and it might run for weeks and even months. Not like computer systems, microcontrollers don’t run conventional working programs. Your code runs straight on the chip.

Like different microcontrollers, the Raspberry Pi Pico has dozens of enter and output pins on the perimeters of the gadget. These pins are essential as they act because the interface with different parts. As an illustration, you may make your microcontroller work together with an LED mild, get knowledge from numerous sensors, present some data on a show, and many others.

The Raspberry Pi Pico makes use of the RP2040 chip. It has a dual-core Arm processor (operating at 133MHz), 264KB of RAM, 26 GPIO pins together with 3 analog inputs, a micro-USB port and a temperature sensor. It doesn’t include Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. And it prices $4.

If you wish to run one thing on the Raspberry Pi Pico, it’s fairly simple. You plug your gadget to your laptop utilizing the micro-USB port. You boot up the Raspberry Pi Pico whereas urgent the button. The gadget will seem in your laptop as an exterior drive.

Along with C, you need to use MicroPython as your growth language. It’s a Python-inspired language for microcontrollers. The Raspberry Pi Basis has written a ton of documentation and a datasheet for the Pico.

Curiously, the Raspberry Pi Basis needs to let others profit from its personal chip design. It has reached out to Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni and Sparkfun in order that they will construct their very own boards utilizing the RP2040 chip. There will probably be a whole ecosystem of RP2040-powered gadgets.

That is an fascinating transfer for the Raspberry Pi Basis as it might go down this path and iterate by itself chip design with extra highly effective variants. It supplies two most important benefits — the flexibility to manage precisely what to placed on board, and worth.

Picture Credit: Raspberry Pi Basis