RP2040 microcontroller board: Raspberry Pi Pico costs from 4 euros

Source: Hardware Luxx added 21st Jan 2021

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has presented the Raspberry Pi Pico, the first microcontroller miniboard developed in-house. While the classic Raspberry Pi is getting faster and bigger in performance and storage capacity, the Raspberry Pi Pico should be used where another Pi board would be too big, too consumption-intensive and simply oversized.

A RP 2017 microcontroller is used on the Raspberry Pi Pico. This includes two ARM Cortex-M0 cores at 133 MHz and 264 KB on-chip memory. The main memory is divided into six memory banks. Via the QSPI bus up to MB can be connected to flash memory. 2 MB of Flash are already installed. There are also two UARTs, SPI and I2C controllers. A USB 1.1 controller with PHY is available for further external interfaces. The Raspberry Pi Pico can be both host and device, i.e. end device.

For the connection of further hardware are 30 GPIO pins available. The microcontroller can also 16 PWM channels control, which is a small indication of the possible application area of ​​the Raspberry Pi Pico. The RP 2040 – Microcontroller is in 40 nm and is located in a 7 x 7 mm QFN – 56 – Package. The actual chip in the package is only 2 mm² in size. The PCB consists of two layers.

The chip for supplying the Raspberry Pi Pico accepts input voltages of 1.8 to 5.5 V. This means that the board can be operated with two or three AA batteries, for example. Independent operation via a lithium-ion cell is also possible.

A complete GCC toolchain is available for programming. The user or programmer can also use MicroPython or Microsoft Visual Studio Code.

The dimensions of the Raspberry Pi Pico are 51 x 21 mm. The board can be supplied with power and programmed via a micro USB connection. The Raspberry Pi Pico can now be bought from around 4 euros, for example from Reichelt, BerryBase and some other partners.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation works with other companies that also have such Offer microboards with the RP 2040. These differ in the amount of memory available, the size of the board and the connections offered. These include the Adafruit Feather RP 2040, Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP 2040, Arduino Nano RP 2040 Connect, Pimoroni PicoSystem, Pimoroni Pico Explorer Base, SparkFun Thing Plus – RP 2040 SparkFun MicroMod RP 2040 Processor and the SparkFun Pro Micro – RP 2040.