I have been playing with the Pico for a couple of weeks now, though I haven't incorporated it into any big projects yet.<p>The quality of the documentation is phenomenal. Very competent people clearly put serious effort into making it great.<p>Another stand out is the Programmable I/O feature. Basically, you have eight separate, programmable state machines that can manipulate I/O pins and do DMA. This lets you offload bit banging from the main cores. Details are in Chapter 3 of the C API docs: <a href="https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/raspberry-pi-pico-c-sdk.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/raspberry-pi-pico-c-...</a><p>I'm a total amateur when it comes to embedded development, so I have no idea how the RP2040 sits in the competitive landscape.
> With 264KB of RAM, you can concentrate on implementing features, not optimising your application for size.<p>I love this comment.<p>Anyone old enough to have coded for 8 and 16 bit home computers, or older mainframes knows how this is true, but it feels quite funny on the day and age of multi-GB heap sizes.
I love the work of the Raspberry Pi foundation. They have changed the market with their innovation and the fact that their hardware has staying power and a huge amount of support.<p>Some will object that none of this is the best hardware or that there are cheaper solutions but it doesn't really matter because basically none of the alternatives have such breadth of support.<p>You can get and Orange Pi or Banana Pi or cheap arduino clone for cheaper and some have better spec but invariably you will end up with a partially implemented SDK, linux images that won't be updated and drivers that often don't really work.<p>There are exceptions but with things like the Compute Module 4, you get all the advantage of a widely supported platform with the flexibility of building it in your product and knowing it will be supported for many years (if you can get your hands on it though).<p>The Pico is in the same vein: it has some innovative aspects, like the PIO and lots of RAM but it's basically a dual core Cortex M0+, just like another gazillion micros.<p>The difference is that it's extremely well documented out of the box; it took years for the ESP chips to get any decent documentation. It also comes with a boot loader and has support for at least C SDK, CircuitPython and MicroPython and there is basically no limit to implement other interpreted language platforms. Switching from one system the other is as easy as copying a file onto a USB drive and rebooting the pico.<p>Most small projects don't need Wifi. The ESP32 is great for that if you need it.<p>The RP2040 is also cheap. The Rpi foundation doesn't make a profit and they work hard at ensuring the hardware is as cheap as it can be. At USD1 it's a very competitive offering for something so versatile.<p>Now the main issue is going to be availability. They only make 40,000 units available for the next 3 months. It's basically a box of a few dozen rolls. A drop in the ocean.<p>With their usual success and the current supply chain issues, it's going to take months before it becomes widely available. Pretty sure we'll still be struggling to by more than 10 units at a time at this time next year...
Maybe I'm old-fashioned (the first microcontroller I used was the venerable Microchip PIC16F84, back in the late 90s) but I still think they label it "perfect" when it has no on-board program storage (i.e. flash).<p>To me, that just makes things so much more complicated than most of the competition, since any board has to go multi-chip in order to add external flash.<p>What am I missing?
There is one other elephant in the room that doesn't seem to be discussed much - lack of a code read protect feature (primarily, I guess, because lack of onboard flash).<p>I've ordered my first pico, and am really looking forward to playing with it (having done a lot of ARM work commercially lately), and from a maker's point, I think the foundation have it absolutely nailed feature-wise. In fact, I'm considering using the pico for a (potentially commercial) side project I've been wanting to do for years, but haven't found a cheap, powerful platform to do it on.<p>However, for anything that wants to transition to a commercial product, lack of CRP is a major roadblock. Yes, I know we all should/want to make our code open source, and have a support model for revenue. For most embedded sellable products, the core IP is the code that runs on the micro, the development of which will be the main driver for product cost. If someone can easily lift that, hardware is easy(ish) to copy, and can potentially significantly undercut your product cost (and your ability to run a viable business).
$1 is a competitive price for a cortex m0+ processor, especially with single quantities!<p>The QFN package is slightly painful for prototyping, but certainly isn't an issue for automated production. I will definitely add the RP4020 to my drawer of dev kits and microcontrollers!
Does anyone have any interesting applications of the programmable IO? I want to use it for something but I'm struggling to come up with good ideas. Driving WS2012B LEDs could be fun but basically any microcontroller can already do that.
That's great, except they're already relatively hard to find as-is. (If you click on the links on that page -- Adafruit, Sparkfun and Pimoroni -- the RP2040-based products are pretty much all out of stock). Sort of reminds me of the Pi Zero, which in theory costs $5, but was pretty hard to find at that price for a long time.
$1 but you have to buy them by 500 units at a time...:<p><a href="https://www.kubii.fr/raspberry-pi-microbit/3328-microcontroleur-raspberry-pi-rp2040-3272496306509.html?src=raspberrypi" rel="nofollow">https://www.kubii.fr/raspberry-pi-microbit/3328-microcontrol...</a>
I guess, this chip comes on time. The other vendors have difficulties with providing enough similar chips on time. If RP2040 is reliably available it will be large success.