New Raspberry Pi Silicon and Boards (microcontrollers)

"It seems like every fruit company is making its own silicon these days, and we’re no exception. RP2040 builds on the lessons we’ve learned from using other microcontrollers in our products, from the Sense HAT to Raspberry Pi 400. It’s the result of many years of hard work by our in-house chip team." -- they said that.

Basically Raspberry Pi noticed that many people were pairing Raspberry Pis (pies?) with other microcontrollers such as Arduinos to be able to handle analog inputs and go to very low-power states. So they created their own MCU (TL;DR: dual Cortex M0+), a little board, and then worked with everyone in this industry to create their own little boards. Yes, there are 5+ boards on this article from Raspberry Pi and other vendors such as Adafruit, SparkFun, and Arduino.

Check it all at their blog

cc @Murilo Polese I think this is something for you.

@SoapDog (Macbook Air)

I NEED IT.

They are coming with this month issue of the HackSpace Magazine. I went to a magazine store in the train station nearby and managed to score one. :-)

@Christian Bundy have you seen the other boards in the article? They are even more interesting in my opinion, but they were not coming with the magazine.

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@Tales_From_The_Dork_Web I don't know if this will be a real problem. Check out the blog post, Adafruit, Arduino, Sparkfun, and many others are releasing their own boards with the RP2040 as well. All the partners you mentioned derive their advantages and appeal for their ecosystem, it is not really about the little boards anymore, it is about the larger picture. Adafruit's Feathers are a whole ecosystem, and so is Arduino. It is the peripherals, the books, the software, and the communities who are driving these players to the top. People who just want cheap boards pick their ESP32 on Aliexpress/Taobao/etc.

One of my coworkers used to say "DigiKey! You can't pay more!"

I'm liking it a lot, apparently it can (after a patch) execute (a slightly stripped down version) of python; opening up the way for a lot of support for sensors/GPIO already used with full-fledged pies.

Then there is the really neat ribbling going on on the side, allowing the board to be soldered to other boards sitting directly next to it and share GPIO bridges (or even just having cables, etc soldered to its side instead of top/bottom. I'd love to see that practice ported over to Arduionos!

I need to get my hands on one of these and start messing around with it (after I've found a proper use-case that is :p).

To me, the most interesting part of this is not actually the board, or even the chip, but the ecosystem that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will build around it. They have the connections, money, and expertise to make it the easiest MCU to work in the market. Lots of the other boards I used had fantastic hardware but were plagued by buggy software, non-existing documentation, and scattered communities.

From this initial launch, they got:

• A really large marketing campaign by giving it away in a magazine for the target audience.
• A very polished MicroPython implementation that takes advantages of the unique features of RP2040.
• A working and cohesive C/C++ toolkit.
• Documentation.
• An installer for the Pi that sets all the C/C++ stuff for working with the Pico.
• A book.
• All the other major players and partners have their own boards featuring the RP2040 chip.

That is from day one. Look at how polished it is. You can pick your Raspberry Pi 400, pick the installer, set everything up for Pi Pico development. Grab the book. Start hacking with MCUs, all inside the Pi ecosystem.