The Raspberry Pi Pico is aimed at projects for which a Raspberry Pi is too big, too power-hungry, too complicated – or too expensive. The Pico costs 4 euros, is a little bigger than an Arduino Nano and has the economical 32 – Bit microcontroller RP 2040 developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation itself Has. The 5.1 centimeter long and 2.1 centimeter wide Pico fits on breadboard for simple circuit construction. It can be programmed and supplied with energy via a micro USB socket, but otherwise runs with voltages from 1.8 volts – also on a rechargeable battery or a battery -Platinum with 32 connections represents 26 GPIO pins with 3.3 volts ready, including the usual functions such as I²C, SPI, UART, PWM and ADC as well as timer.

Raspbery Pi Pico (7 images) The Raspberry Pi Pico is slightly larger than an Arduino Nano

(Image: Raspberry Pi Foundation) Pico-Chip RP 2040 The only 2 square millimeters large The RP 2040 leaves the Raspberry Pi Foundation from TSMC with 40 – manufacture nanometer structures. The microcontroller has two ARM cores of the type Cortex-M0 +, which can be used with up to 133 MHz clock. Also installed are 133 KByte SRAM, divided into several banks, so that the two controllers can do it in parallel to be able to use. A special feature are eight programmable I / O (PIO) state machines.

Except for the RP 2040 on the Raspberry Pi Pico there are still 2 MByte QSPI flash for program code and a voltage converter.

software tools The Raspberry Pi Foundation provides a GCC toolchain for programming the Pico in C. Alternatively, programs for the Pico can be written with MicroPython or Microsoft Visual Studio Code. There are also optimized libraries for floating point calculations for the GCC toolchain, the Cortex-M0 + has no FPU.

Variants from other companies Besides the Raspberry Pi Pico there are other RP 2040 – Boards from other manufacturers such as Adafruit and Sparkfun. Some of these boards have more flash memory, charge controllers for lithium batteries, 5-volt-tolerant GPIO pins or USB-C.

Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation announces in the Blog about the Adafruit Feather RP 2040, the Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP 2040, the SparkFun Thing Plus – RP 2040, the SparkFun Pro Micro – RP 2040 and the plug-in module SparkFun MicroMod RP 2040 Processor for MicroMod baseboards with M.2 socket.

Pimorini has the PicoSystem with a small display, directional pad and fire buttons, especially for games on the RP 2040 developed.

(ciw)