Raspberry Pi has just launched the new Pico microcontroller board. The board includes 264KB of on-chip SRAM, 2MB of on-board QSPI flash and a single USB 1.1 controller and port. The board also supports the addition of 16MB of off-chip flash memory. I/O options include I2C, SPI and PIO.
Two features of the Raspberry Pi Pico of note are the $4 price tag and the fact that it runs on Raspberry Pi’s custom silicon in the form of the RP2040. The RP2040 microcontroller was designed by Raspberry Pi and includes an Arm Cortex-M0+ processor.
Designed to be programmed using C/C++ (time to dust off your old copy of Kernighan and Ritchie) and MicroPython, loading your code onto the device is as simple as connecting to your development system using the USB port and dragging and dropping a .uf2 file onto the device flash storage.
If you haven’t ventured into the world of Raspberry Pi the Pico, at only $4, may just be the chance you were waiting for.
