Raspberry Pi is the go-to laptop for varsity initiatives or different cool experiments. The Raspberry Foundation has launched 4 generations of those tiny computer systems, with as much as 8GB of RAM. There’s even a compact keyboard with a Raspberry Pi baked inside. And now, the Raspberry Foundation has introduced the Raspberry Pi Pico, the corporate’s first microcontroller.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is the group’s first step in the direction of constructing its personal customized chips, which is a extremely large deal. This microcontroller is backed by their first customized chip, the RP2040, which was designed in-house. What does it have on provide? Well, Raspberry Pi Pico features a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor @ 133MHz, 264KB of RAM (yeah, kilobytes), 30 GPIO pins together with 4 for analog inputs, a micro-USB port, a clickable button, and extra.
What about storage? The microcontroller pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash reminiscence but it surely helps as much as 16MB of off-chip Flash reminiscence by way of a devoted QSPI bus.
Also, this board doesn’t require loads of energy. The energy provide chip on Raspberry Pi Pico helps enter voltages from 1.8-5.5V. This means you’ll be able to energy the board utilizing “a wide variety of sources, including two or three AA cells in series, or single lithium-ion cell,” as per the official blog post. You can get began with a breadboard design in case you don’t wish to solder down the parts. Pico is programmable in MicroPython (python language for these trying to code for microcontrollers) and C/C++.
The Raspberry Pi basis is now solely launching its personal board. It has reached out to firms resembling Arduino, Adafruit, and Pimoroni to combine its new RP2040 chip into their board designs. There’s already a wholesome checklist of boards based mostly on this practice chip listed within the weblog publish. This contains the PicoSystem game console, the Adafruit Feather RP 2040 board, and Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.
As for the price, Raspberry Pi Pico can also be tremendous inexpensive and prices simply $4 (~Rs. 290) within the US. You can get one free of charge with the February concern of the HackSpace journal.
