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Introduction

This page was last updated : 01-Feb-21 09:57:00

On 21 januari 2021 the Raspberry PI foundation announced a all new and there first microcontroller product the Raspberry PI Pico. It's build on the RP2040, a brand-new chip developed by Raspberry PI foundation and is targeted  as a for deep-embedded development or a companion to there Raspberry Pi computer.

The Raspberry PI Pico is a low-cost, high-performance microcontroller board with flexible digital interfaces. Key features include:

• RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the United Kingdom
• Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
• 264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of on-board Flash memory
• Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards
• USB 1.1 with device and host support
• Low-power sleep and dormant modes
• Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB
• 26 × multi-function GPIO pins
• 2 × SPI, 2 × I2C, 2 × UART, 3 × 12-bit ADC, 16 × controllable PWM channels
• Accurate clock and timer on-chip
• Temperature sensor
• Accelerated floating-point libraries on-chip
• 8 × Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support

 

Pin diagram (c) Raspberry PI foundation.

After reading the blogpost, I ordered 5 of them to get myself familiar with this new microcontroller and to do some experiments with it. I downloaded the manuals and started reading the various documents they published to get developers up to speed. The PICO can be programmed in C/C++ and MicroPython (check out the document section on there website).

2 days later postman didn't have to ring (twice) and it was hobby time. 

Let get started....

  

More to come . . .

I'm working on some more topics regarding the usage of the Pico like : 

• measurement on how fast you can bit-bang the IO (it's very fast got up to 62.5Mhz). 
• interesting findings regarding code optimizations (or lag of it) by going through the disassembled output.
• some hamradio projects I have which I want to try to port to the Pico
• and much more, but have a day job to pay the bills so spare/hobby time isn't always there. 

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