New kid on the block: Raspberry Pico
nutson
Posts: 242
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/pico/getting-started/
Dual core, 8 smartpins, 6 multipled memory blocks, code execution from internal and external memory, $4
Dual core, 8 smartpins, 6 multipled memory blocks, code execution from internal and external memory, $4
Comments
There are plenty of other capable boards around, but the Pi Pico has the advantage of local suppliers, great support, and probably a huge user base. It should do well.
Saw the post, downloaded the data sheet and other info and looked it over. Pretty good bang for the price.
Has anyone seen mention of what volumes that $4 is for ?
Addit: No, wait, that's not the Chip price, that's the Pico-board price ?!
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/17829
Raspberry Pi Pico In stock DEV-17829 ROHS $4.00 Note: We have an order limit of 100 per customer on this product.
Wonder what the chip will cost
I find it rather interesting that SPF has already committed the new processor to their special ideas for boards. This tells me that they expect developers to create and make work their ideas on the Pico, and then take them to the SPF boards.
Very interesting.
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Mascot arrived yesterday, still has head in box.
Strange.. There's a hoard of robots swimming to California, they plan on taking over a channel island and making it fly.
Hmmm?
You've already quoted them, SPF is the abbreviation for Sparkfun.
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Mascot arrived yesterday, still has head in box.
Strange.. There's a hoard of robots swimming to California, they plan on taking over a channel island and making it fly.
How can commercial companies compete with a charity that pays no taxes and no profits to owners?
Their sample base board that the Pico board plugs/solders onto...
VGA
If you want VGA, then you need 17 pins! They steal one of the green pins from the 5+6+5 16bit, so it's 5xR + 5xG + 5xB + H + V, and the corresponding series resistors.
Buttons x3
Share the VGA R[0], G[0] and B[0] pins
SD
SD uses 4 or 6 pins if using QSPI.
UART
If you are only using SD in SPI mode then the 2 unused pins can be used for a UART.
Audio
Audio PWM uses 2 pins or I2S with an external chip uses 3 pins.
Available pins remaining
None!
Of course you do have the USB port, the QSPI Flash, and the Debug port on the Pico board too.
This is a designer's choice. The VGA is simply bitbanged, so you can do what you want, for example 222 as in P1 using 8 pins, nobody restrict it to 555 or 565 format
Being far from P2 capabilities it is still a powerful board for its price. If you need something between P1 and P2, this can be a good choice. 2 "cogs", 256k RAM, 8 smart pins, 1 ADC, 26 GPIO.
And in fact Sparkfun saw the writing on a wall someplace, and already have boards out to use when the Pico design idea finishes.
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Mascot off on a longer weekend.
Swimmer bots on island.
Did you see the pico board comes on an smt reel?
But I expect the Raspberry name will mean that it will sell in huge volumes. And the support is excellent from the outset - something that the ESP32 initially lacked.
Past performance of the Raspberry Pi foundation suggests that there will be a Pico 2, Pico 3, Pico 4, ... coming over the next few years, no doubt fixing many of these shortcomings.
I've bought a couple of them to try out, but they'll have to wait as I'm currently playing with much more primitive 8-bit microcontrollers.
The RPi philosophy: don't add something which costs and only a few people will use. Need Wifi, buy an ESP. Need Wifi and the Pico capability, buy a Pico and an ESP. Want even more and wifi, buy a P2.... and an ESP.
As in P2. They added a fast library in ROM
But there ARE hardware dividers there, one per core, 8 cycles.
I think not only Pico. The Pico is a sandbox for something much bigger: Raspberry Pi 5 without Broadcom stuff onboard.
On the FLiP side you would be picking up 4 ADC ports, a couple of cores, some, possibly accessible extra memory, plus of course all the extra IO pins. The ADC pins, on the Pico, are 0-5V, while on the P2 they are 0-3.3V. It is a lot harder to find 3.3V voltage divider breakout boards, then the 5V ones.
I also think that on the Pico side, because it has micropython available, I think you could set up the Pico cores with multiprocessing, this I think, the Pico cores, would behave more like the P1 cogs.
Now, with all that said, I am not sure how you would get the two to communicate. I would imagine the hard work would have to be done on the Pico side, a master, and the FLiP as a slave, not sure if it could be the other way around.
On one of the P2 videos that I was watching, there were suggestions being made about an Edge card that would hold a FLiP module. I also think that, at some point Parallax will be coming up with an Edge breakout that will have all the IO pins available. Now, with a FLiP Edge card, which could have an RP2040 on it, that would make a heck of a combination.
Ray
I wonder how fast the 2040 ports can shift ?
The std UARTS seem to be limits to SysCLK/16, which means ~ 8MHz upper limit, but the RP2040 State engine PIO can support more bits, so could pair well with P2, for a custom-length interface.
With Xtals on both sides of a P2 <-> RP2040 link, 20b or 32b can be supported.
22b would support 16b payloads into a 64x16b memory array.
It's a real shame the USB side of RP2040 is only Full Speed, as there is room for a useful High Speed USB MCU.
They did HDMI, so hundreds of MHz as a transmitter. I dopn't know what fast it can receive.
Hello!
Back on the Hack-A-Day site concerning the Pico, it's still engendering comments. For my efforts, the state machine behind the I/O connectors did also attract me. But, as with the Pi and certainly the two Propeller chips, the power levels are 3v3 so that would cause some upset to the new user with the Pico.
Whole discussions exist on the Pi website regarding how to safely connect it to Logic. Whereas here we've already surmounted that issue. We shall see what does happen regarding the Pico. It has garnered an interesting following on the Sparkfun site, concerning new boards there. The A** people have made plans to create a new board in their nano form factor.
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Mascot on tea break.