Raspberry Pi Pico

In a break from the norm Les Pounder tests the latest Pi: a $4 microcontroller featuring the first ‘Pi Silicon’ created by Raspberry Pi.

- Les Pounder

SPECS

SoC: RP2040, dual-core Arm Cortex M0+

Clock: 133MHz

Mem: 264Kb

Flash: 2MB

Comms: USB v1.1

GPIO: 26 multifunction pins, 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 2x UART, 3x 12-bit ADC, 16x PWM channels, 2x PIO (eightstate machines)

Extras: Real time clock, temperature sensor

Size: 51x21mm

Raspberry Pi has a history of disrupting the status quo. In 2012, the first $35 Raspberry Pi offered a low-cost entry into a market of single-board computers that was dominated by boards costing in excess of $100. The Raspberry Pi Pico, the latest board in the range, disrupts a different part of the electronics market, taking on microcontroller boards like Arduino.

Available for just $4, the Pico is powered by Raspberry Pi’s own custom silicon, the RP2040 SoC, which features an Arm Cortex M0+ processor running at up to 133MHz, with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of onboard storage. It’s a great choice for robots, weather stations or other electronics projects. The board doesn’t run a full operating system, but instead launches programs you write in either MicroPython or C on a host computer (that could be a PC, a Mac or a regular Pi) and upload to it.

Perhaps even more important than the Pico itself is Raspberry Pi Foundation’s first foray into making its own silicon. We wanted to learn more about the RP2040 and so we asked James Adams, chief operating officer at Raspberry Pi Trading to tell us how “Pi Silicon” was created.