Meet Raspberry Silicon: Raspberry Pi Pico now on sale at $4

Today, we’re launching our first microcontroller-class product: Raspberry Pi Pico. Priced at just $4, it is built on RP2040, a brand-new chip developed right here at Raspberry Pi. Whether you’re looking for a standalone board for deep-embedded development or a companion to your Raspberry Pi computer, or you’re taking your first steps with a microcontroller, this is the board for you.

You can buy your Raspberry Pi Pico today online from one of our Approved Resellers. Or head to your local newsagent, where every copy of this month’s HackSpace magazine comes with a free Pico, as well as plenty of guides and tutorials to help you get started with it. If coronavirus restrictions mean that you can’t get to your newsagent right now, you can grab a subscription and get Pico delivered to your door.

Oops!… We Did It Again

Microcomputers and microcontrollers

Many of our favourite projects, from cucumber sorters to high altitude balloons, connect Raspberry Pi to the physical world: software running on the Raspberry Pi reads sensors, performs computations, talks to the network, and drives actuators. This ability to bridge the worlds of software and hardware has contributed to the enduring popularity of Raspberry Pi computers, with over 37 million units sold to date.

But there are limits: even in its lowest power mode a Raspberry Pi Zero will consume on the order of 100 milliwatts; Raspberry Pi on its own does not support analogue input; and while it is possible to run “bare metal” software on a Raspberry Pi, software running under a general-purpose operating system like Linux is not well suited to low-latency control of individual I/O pins.

Many hobbyist and industrial applications pair a Raspberry Pi with a microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi takes care of heavyweight computation, network access, and storage, while the microcontroller handles analogue input and low-latency I/O and, sometimes, provides a very low-power standby mode.

Until now, we’ve not been able to figure out a way to make a compelling microcontroller-class product of our own. To make the product we really wanted to make, first we had to learn to make our own chips.

Raspberry Si

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.

RP2040 on a Raspberry Pi Pico

We had three principal design goals for RP2040: high performance, particularly for integer workloads; flexible I/O, to allow us to talk to almost any external device; and of course, low cost, to eliminate barriers to entry. We ended up with an incredibly powerful little chip, cramming all this into a 7 × 7 mm QFN-56 package containing just two square millimetres of 40 nm silicon. RP2040 has:

  • Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
  • 264KB (remember kilobytes?) of on-chip RAM
  • Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
  • DMA controller
  • Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
  • 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
  • 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers
  • 16 × PWM channels
  • 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
  • 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
  • USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming

And this isn’t just a powerful chip: it’s designed to help you bring every last drop of that power to bear. With six independent banks of RAM, and a fully connected switch at the heart of its bus fabric, you can easily arrange for the cores and DMA engines to run in parallel without contention.

For power users, we provide a complete C SDK, a GCC-based toolchain, and Visual Studio Code integration.

As Cortex-M0+ lacks a floating-point unit, we have commissioned optimised floating-point functions from Mark Owen, author of the popular Qfplib libraries; these are substantially faster than their GCC library equivalents, and are licensed for use on any RP2040-based product.

With two fast cores and and a large amount of on-chip RAM, RP2040 is a great platform for machine learning applications. You can find Pete Warden’s port of Google’s TensorFlow Lite framework here. Look out for more machine learning content over the coming months.

For beginners, and other users who prefer high-level languages, we’ve worked with Damien George, creator of MicroPython, to build a polished port for RP2040; it exposes all of the chip’s hardware features, including our innovative PIO subsystem. And our friend Aivar Annamaa has added RP2040 MicroPython support to the popular Thonny IDE.

Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico is designed as our low-cost breakout board for RP2040. It pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash memory, and a power supply chip supporting input voltages from 1.8-5.5V. This allows you to power your Pico from a wide variety of sources, including two or three AA cells in series, or a single lithium-ion cell.

Pico provides a single push button, which can be used to enter USB mass-storage mode at boot time and also as a general input, and a single LED. It exposes 26 of the 30 GPIO pins on RP2040, including three of the four analogue inputs, to 0.1”-pitch pads; you can solder headers to these pads or take advantage of their castellated edges to solder Pico directly to a carrier board. Volume customers will be able to buy pre-reeled Pico units: in fact we already supply Pico to our Approved Resellers in this format.

The Pico PCB layout was co-designed with the RP2040 silicon and package, and we’re really pleased with how it turned out: a two-layer PCB with a solid ground plane and a GPIO breakout that “just works”.

A reel of Raspberry Pi Pico boards
Reely good

Whether Raspberry Pi Pico is your first microcontroller or your fifty-first, we can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Raspberry Pi Pico documentation

Our ambition with RP2040 wasn’t just to produce the best chip, but to support that chip with the best documentation. Alasdair Allan, who joined us a year ago, has overseen a colossal effort on the part of the whole engineering team to document every aspect of the design, with simple, easy-to-understand examples to help you get the most out of your Raspberry Pi Pico.

You can find complete documentation for Raspberry Pi Pico, and for RP2040, its SDK and toolchain, here.

Get Started with Raspberry Pi Pico book

To help you get the most of your Pico, why not grab a copy of Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico by Gareth Halfacree and our very own Ben Everard. It’s ideal for beginners who are new (or new-ish) to making with microcontrollers.

Our colleagues at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have also produced an educational project to help you get started with Raspberry Pi Pico. You can find it here.

Partners

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working with our friends at Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, and Sparkfun to create accessories for Raspberry Pi Pico, and a variety of other boards built on the RP2040 silicon platform. Here are just a few of the products that are available to buy or pre-order today.

Adafruit Feather RP 2040

RP2040 joins the hundreds of boards in the Feather ecosystem with the fully featured Feather RP 2040 board. The 2″ × 0.9″ dev board has USB C, Lipoly battery charging, 4MB of QSPI flash memory, a STEMMA QT I2C connector, and an optional SWD debug port. With plenty of GPIO for use with any FeatherWing, and hundreds of Qwiic/QT/Grove sensors that can plug and play, it’s the fast way to get started.

Feathery goodness

Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP 2040

Need a petite dev board for RP2040? The Itsy Bitsy RP 2040 is positively tiny, but it still has lots of GPIO, 4MB of QSPI flash, boot and reset buttons, a built-in RGB NeoPixel, and even a 5V output logic pin, so it’s perfect for NeoPixel projects!

Small is beautiful

Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect

Arduino joins the RP2040 family with one of its most popular formats: the Arduino Nano. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect combines the power of RP2040 with high-quality MEMS sensors (a 9-axis IMU and microphone), a highly efficient power section, a powerful WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the ECC608 crypto chip, enabling anybody to create secure IoT applications with this new microcontroller. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect will be available for pre-order in the next few weeks.

Get connected!

Pimoroni PicoSystem

PicoSystem is a tiny and delightful handheld game-making experience based on RP2040. It comes with a simple and fast software library, plus examples to make your mini-gaming dreams happen. Or just plug it into USB and drop the best creations from the Raspberry Pi-verse straight onto the flash drive.

Pixel-pushing pocket-sized playtime

Pimoroni Pico Explorer Base

Pico Explorer offers an embedded electronics environment for educators, engineers, and software people who want to learn hardware with less of the “hard” bit. It offers easy expansion and breakout along with a whole bunch of useful bits.

Go explore!

SparkFun Thing Plus – RP2040

The Thing Plus – RP2040 is a low-cost, high-performance board with flexible digital interfaces featuring Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 microcontroller. Within the Feather-compatible Thing Plus form factor with 18 GPIO pins, the board offers an SD card slot, 16MB (128Mbit) flash memory, a JST single-cell battery connector (with a charging circuit and fuel gauge sensor), an addressable WS2812 RGB LED, JTAG PTH pins, mounting holes, and a Qwiic connector to add devices from SparkFun’s quick-connect I2C ecosystem.

Thing One, or Thing Two?

SparkFun MicroMod RP2040 Processor

The MicroMod RP2040 Processor Board is part of SparkFun’s MicroMod modular interface system. The MicroMod M.2 connector makes it easy to connect your RP2040 Processor Board with the MicroMod carrier board that gives you the inputs and outputs you need for your project.

The Mighty Micro

SparkFun Pro Micro – RP2040

The Pro Micro RP2040 harnesses the capability of RP2040 on a compact development board with the USB functionality that is the hallmark of all SparkFun’s Pro Micro boards. It has a WS2812B addressable LED, boot button, reset button, Qwiic connector, USB-C, and castellated pads.

Go Pro

Credits

It’s fair to say we’ve taken the long road to creating Raspberry Pi Pico. Chip development is a complicated business, drawing on the talents of many different people. Here’s an incomplete list of those who have contributed to the RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico projects:

Dave Akerman, Sam Alder, Alasdair Allan, Aivar Annamaa, Jonathan Bell, Mike Buffham, Dom Cobley, Steve Cook, Phil Daniell, Russell Davis, Phil Elwell, Ben Everard, Andras Ferencz, Nick Francis, Liam Fraser, Damien George, Richard Gordon, F Trevor Gowen, Gareth Halfacree, David Henly, Kevin Hill, Nick Hollinghurst, Gordon Hollingworth, James Hughes, Tammy Julyan, Jason Julyan, Phil King, Stijn Kuipers, Lestin Liu, Simon Long, Roy Longbottom, Ian Macaulay, Terry Mackown, Simon Martin, Jon Matthews, Nellie McKesson, Rod Oldfield, Mark Owen, Mike Parker, David Plowman, Dominic Plunkett, Graham Sanderson, Andrew Scheller, Serge Schneider, Nathan Seidle, Vinaya Puthur Sekar, Mark Sherlock, Martin Sperl, Mike Stimson, Ha Thach, Roger Thornton, Jonathan Welch, Simon West, Jack Willis, Luke Wren, David Wright.

We’d also like to thank our friends at Sony Pencoed and Sony Inazawa, Microtest, and IMEC for their help in bringing these projects to fruition.

Buy your Raspberry Pi Pico from one of our Approved Resellers today, and let us know what you think!

FAQs

Are you planning to make RP2040 available to customers?

We hope to make RP2040 broadly available in the second quarter of 2021.

251 comments

Vas avatar

Congratulations! Another revolution? :) For $4…

David avatar

Analog inputs! Yay!

Jeff Geerling avatar

I had a blast testing this little board out, and I am over the moon about the price! Thanks for delivering a great little board that my son is already trying to wrestle out of my hands so ‘he can be an inventor’ :)

Mark Devlin avatar

Just got my Pi 400 a couple of weeks ago to “learn electronics” at 45 Jeff, thanks in part to your YouTube channel.
Just bought one of these too.
Thanks!

Dale Marcell avatar

Hi Jeff, Raspberry Pi Pico has a castellated edge. do you know if any of the main manufactures have developed a career board for DYI projects?
Take care
Dale

Blackbox avatar

I find it a pity that when you connect two Raspberry Pico you can’t write a Udev rule to symlink the device because the iserial is empty.

Michael Horne avatar

Congratulations, all!

EpicMArio71 avatar

I need buy dis like now!

Anton avatar

Oh, wow! Absolutely awesome, thank you!

Anton avatar

And please, what is then the power consumption?

Jeff Geerling avatar

Check out the Pico datasheet (https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/pico_datasheet.pdf) — it has an entire section devoted to power consumption measurements in various conditions (section 3.1).

Anton avatar

Thank you!

Michael H. avatar

Thanks for the pdf link Jeff…..

Paul Beech avatar

We’re over the moon this is finally out. We went big on boards to support the RP2040 and Pico :D
https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico

Jim Manley avatar

O.R.D.E.R.E.D. including all of the wonderful related kit. Sure miss everyone I met on the Pirate Crew at Maker Faire SF, and wonder when it will ever be possible to meet in meatspace again before being marched off to the gulags for mandatory “re-education” … Take good care – Jim KJ7JHE

Benoit DEVIJVER avatar

Wonderfull news, I’ll have again to buy this to support your work !

Gordon77 avatar

Great news, l was just looking at similar products.
What are VBUS and VSYS ?

James Adams avatar

VBUS is the 5V USB input voltage. VSYS is the ‘system’ input voltage used to generate 3.3V. On the board VSYS is fed from VBUS via a Schottky diode. Feeding external power in via VSYS (through another Schottky diode) allows eithre VBUS [if connected] or your external power [if connected] to power the board, whichever is the higher voltage. It’s designed to be simple but flexible.

Anton avatar

And please, how many gates RP2040 has, if that’s not a secret? Just curious!

Cyber Killer avatar

No pins again? That’s a bummer.

Marcus avatar

Some resellers are already providing versions of the Raspberry Pi Pico with headers.

Mahjongg avatar

Gold plated pinheaders are relatively expensive, and the moon shaped edge indentations make soldering the board directly to a carrier easy, no pinheaders needed.
But I suspect other board makers will sell versions with headers.

XiaoYuBiBiBi avatar

This is a super cool chip

nixCraft avatar

Finally, some good news in 2021. The price is so sweet. I am drooling over Pimoroni PicoSystem.

smartroad avatar

Wow! I have brought one to play with. I was wondering, the Micropython book that is available with this, is it available in PDF format to buy?

James Adams avatar
smartroad avatar

Thanks James, donated and downloaded :) Didn’t feel right downloading for free :D

James Adams avatar

Thank you! :)

Jatin Gandhi avatar

Thanks a lot :-)

James Young avatar

Nice board. One thing that bugs me is how there is no silkscreened pin numbers on the board.

Eben Upton avatar

They’re on the back!

Szaja avatar

So it’s a drawback. :-)

Eben Upton avatar

I see what you did there.

pd avatar

Should be available on back side of the board.

shiftyc avatar

They’re on the underside.

mahjongg avatar

Just use the board upside down then, solder the headers on the topside, and put it in a breadboard upside down. Perhaps the RPF will add pin numbers on the topside in the future should be possible if there is a great demand for it, in the meantime just count!

Stewart Watkiss avatar

Great. Microcontrollers are really useful and having one that has a reasonable amount of memory and works with Micro Python is going to make these even more accessible for new programmers / makers.

Manoel avatar

Sweet! Will it be possible to order RP2040 chips alone? (without having a MOQ in the range of 1000s?)

James Adams avatar

Yes we are planning to make the chips available in due course, see the FAQ at the end of the post.

Anton avatar

It has everything: documentation, dual core chip, mass storage, SDK, partners, …, everything! I can’t believe…
Please, two more questions: what is “integer divider peripherals”? And what are the new floating-point functions? Where do they live and what does it mean “are licensed for use on any RP2040-based product”?

James Adams avatar

Integer divide peripheral is fast internal hardware to do integer division. The floating point functions are hand-optmised assembler code to do floating point operations, faster than defaults included with GCC etc.

Anton avatar

I know it’s a bit early but is it possible to shed more light on both the integer divider and FP routines? What the divider developed in-house? How many cycles does the division instruction take? Is it 64-by-32-bits or 32-by-32 bits? And the FP routines, are they open source? What license? Are they IEEE 754 compliant? Can they be used with other M0-based processors (in proprietary applications, for example)?

Ewan avatar

If they were open source they’d be licenced for use on anything, not just anything with an RP2040.

Nick avatar

Open/closed source and licensing are separate things.

James Hughes avatar

The Divider routines were developed in house, they are fully described in the datasheet. In addition there is HW PWM (this one is pretty cool), and a HW interpolator. And the PIO is very novel and clever.

Anton avatar

I’m really curious about this, which algorithm does it use? Goldschmidt division?

Mark avatar

The floating-point code is based on GPLv2 code. There is a link in the post.

Anton avatar

The post only mentions that it was written by the author of a GPLv2 library. That does not necessary implies that the new library is GPLv2 as well. Unless you, Mark, happen to be Mark Owen.

Simon Long avatar

He does… :)

Nick avatar

Section 2.3.1.5 of the truly excellent RP2040 datasheet (https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.pdf) has some of your answers. The answers to the licensing questions are at the page linked in the blog (https://www.quinapalus.com/qfplib.html)

Florin avatar

How can this new rpi can be overclocked ? And does it have any internal timers?

Ricky avatar

Does Micropython run on this?

James Adams avatar
fanoush avatar

Wow, very nice, tanks. Was expecting risc-v at first but I guess this is more conservative choice.

Hamish McLean avatar

I would have expected risc-v too. Why do you think they went with arm instead?

Szaja avatar

Awesome product! Congratulations. It’s also great to see that all leading maker-focused companies will use and support this chip. Future is bright!

Efried avatar

How does it compare to ESP32?
How stable 1-wire bus is operated, reading DS18B20?
Is there LoRaWan connectivity?

Jeff Geerling avatar

I had a little trouble getting onewire working in MicroPython with the early beta software for the Pico, but late last night onewire support was fixed and now you should be able to use the DS18B20 :)

See my notes in my review video: https://youtu.be/dUCgYXF01Do (as a workaround, I used the temperature sensor built into the RP2040).

Chris avatar

It’s a remarkable achievement and I look forward to getting hold of one. Shame that it doesn’t use the newer USB Type-C connector, though. I do hope the Foundation plan to release an updated board soon.

Georgian avatar

Please us small k for kilo -> kB (Kilobyte) not KB. Thank you.

Simon Long avatar

kB is a decimal kilobyte – 1000 bytes. KB is a binary kilobyte – 1024 bytes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

Ben avatar

That’s why the standard SI became Ki and not just K
Since that can’t be done with other prefixes.
Though K is still in common use.
Ref: Same wiki, NIST or other SI unit places.

Georgian avatar

Thank you for your answer.
kilo = 1000 should only be used when talking about weight.
kilo = 1024 should only be used in informatics.
Both small. Capital K should be used for Kelvin.
Anyway, this is just the way I learnt and how it makes more sense to me. Have a great day.

Georgian avatar

*not just weight. Other units too…like Ω and so on…

John O avatar

That’s correct! The general rule is that names, such as Kelvin and Watt etc. are capitalised when used as units.

Mark M. avatar

That is not correct. Although counterintuitive, units named after scientists are in fact written as lower case i.e. volts, watts, ohms.

Rus avatar

Well I’d agree that kB refers to 1000 bytes but the wiki page you quote states KB to denote 1024 bytes is deprecated and we should now use KiB.

Neil avatar

Oh hurray! You have learned how to design a power supply!

MW avatar

These are manufactured at Sony Pencoed ??

James Adams avatar

These are manufactured at Sony Inazawa, Japan.

Jim Manley avatar

I just lovvve their Long Version … “Inazawadavida, Baby, Doncha know that I love you Honey … “ ;)

Phil Atkin avatar

This is a BRILLIANT device. I was working on a ‘first musical instrument’ for kids project a few years back that needed ADC (microphone to detect blowing) and DAC for audio output – how would you hook up a reasonable quality (16-bit 44.1kHz) DAC to this affordably? Also, I am so pleased to see this a fixed-point device.

Michael Horne avatar

Take a look at this from Pimoroni: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pico-audio-pack
Does that give you what you want?

Phil Atkin avatar

Apart from the eye-watering price (relative to the ‘host computer’) it does, definitely good enough to prototype.

JumpZero avatar

Fantastic,
As a Raspberry pi user since 2012 and ESP8266, ESP32 MicroPython user as well I’m very excited to try this pico. I ordered one already!

JumpZero avatar

I haven’t seen anything about usb2serial (CH340, CP2102, FT232 etc..) Did I miss it?

James avatar

You can set up your application so that the Pico acts as a USB serial device (console output goes down the USB), so you don’t need a UART connected, just the USB. But that does mean you cannot use the USB for other purposes.

aBUGSworstnightmare avatar

Noted this new addition to the lineup but need to say that I’m not too exited atm.
Will there be support for other IDE’s (i.e. Rowley CrossWorks, Mbed etc) as well?

James Hughes avatar

Not from us, we prefer to spend our limited manpower developing and improving innovative products rather than making more IDE’s work with existing ones. I’m sure some of these of these other IDE producers will take on the challenge.

Aardappeltaart avatar

Nice new board, my head is spinning with new ideas!

Most of them need connectivity though, is there a Wifi/Bluetooth add-on board, or is there a Pico W version planned? :)

ben avatar

If you read the blog then they have basically made a chip and are selling that to ‘people’…
They have provided a nice reference setup ‘the pico’ for me, you and whoever to use as they like :-)
You’ll also see many other version of it from Arduino, Adafruit, Pimoroni etc.
So need something different then your take your pick, find the design you want.

Aardappeltaart avatar

I have read the blog, the Arduino version with Wifi is not (yet) available. Coupke of weeks.

So the conclusion is: don’t by a RPI Pico if you need connectivity?

Or is there an affordable Wifi/BT add-on board?

Naveen avatar

I am going to love it!
#include “pico/stdlib.h”
int main() {
const uint LED_PIN = 25;
gpio_init(LED_PIN);
gpio_set_dir(LED_PIN, GPIO_OUT);
while (true) {
gpio_put(LED_PIN, 1);
sleep_ms(250);
gpio_put(LED_PIN, 0);
sleep_ms(250);
}
}

Chris avatar

Congratulations! Looks great and I have already ordered a couple. Will there be an overview on how the Pico compares with the Arduino family? I guess a number of us are familiar with the variety of Arduino based microcontrollers such as the Nano, Teensy and ESP8266 WiFi based Arduinos and it would be very helpful to get an idea of where the Raspberry Pi Pico would provide new technical features and advantages. Also can you say if you are planning to release a version with on board WiFi connectivity? Thank you

JumpZero avatar

I read from the datasheet:
4.7. USB
RP2040 has an integrated USB1.1 PHY and controller which can be used in both Device and Host mode. Pico adds the
two required 27 ohm external resistors and brings this interface to a standard micro-USB port.
The USB port can be used to access the USB bootloader (BOOTSEL mode) stored in the RP2040 boot ROM. It can also be
used by user code, to access an external USB device or host.
So the RP2040 is doing the job of the USB2Serial converter (CH340, CP2102, etc..)
When the pico is plugged to a Linux host does a /dev/ttyUSB0 come up?

JumpZero avatar

Well found the answer:
Upgraded Thonny to 3.3.3 on my Pi400 via “apt full-upgrade”
there is a new option in the interpreter list : MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico) and when selected the serial port will be /dev/ttyAMA0

Doc W avatar

I was just about to order one, then I noticed it lacks WiFi, which makes this a little… “restricted” in use vs similarly priced NodeMCU, etc WiFi capable ESP8266 boards,
I’d love to get a couple to try in home automaton or sensors, but the lack of WiFi makes this just less useful.

Jon Wise avatar

I agree. Is there software for a usb wifi dongle?

adrian avatar

That’s an excellent point. Although I’d rather use one of the other devices if wireless connectivity were the main issue for me, there is host-mode USB. So, with appropriate software, wifi, bluetooth or RF24 dongles could be added.

Neil avatar

The Arduino adaptation of the RP2040 will be the one you want in that case.

Korda avatar

1. Is possible run program from flash directly?
2. Why not lipo power too?
3. Why not put MMU?
4. Why not mRuby too?
in my opinion more ram is necessary (512 KB)will be great. many project adre big because power is big. If lipo , AA, 18620 etc. will be using directly with this device many project will be smart and small. Meybe add input of solar panel too? Second idea are simple. Make a normal mechanical keyboard (Planck) and making pico as firmware and for example RPI zero as mainboard for linux and all this device put inside keyboard. many language need more keys for example this https://klawiatura.wordpress.com/wersja-mini/ two knob/rotor, light etc.

Nick avatar

Is it possible with all these features to stay in 4 EUR price range?

Chris Morse avatar

Can the Pico act as a HID (human interface device)?
I use teensy’s for this to make keyboards, so I’m reaaaaally hoping they can!
Not that it really matters, I’ve still ordered a couple cos I’m already sold.

Eben Upton avatar

Yes, they can.

adrian avatar

If you use it as a dedicated USB device you would want a unique VID /PID.

Microchip (used to ?) make these available to their silicon customers. Could Raspberry Pi do the same ?

Manish avatar

Hi, Will these be available to buy in large volume or is it one board per customer?

Eben Upton avatar

There is no per-customer limit (though I’m sure some resellers will operate one in the first few weeks to prevent scalping).

Manish avatar

Thanks Eben, that’s great news. Are the other RPi boards going to be available without limit also? I know that I would love to build solutions from the Pico, to the Zero, to the RPi 3, Compute Modules to RPi 4 Compute modules. Currently, as I understand, only the Pico, RPi 3 compute module and RPi4 compute modules are available without limit per customer. The others cannot be implemented in commercial projects that require scale? Would I be correct in this assumption?

James Hughes avatar

All the Pi range are available without a purchase limit, however, the Pi Zero $5 price is for one off. You can buy Pi Zero in quantity by asking us directly, but you will pay more.

Manish avatar

The RP2040 seems to fill a nice gap between the microcontroller and embedded linux space. At Dual cores m0+ running at 133MHZ, it seems to be a beefy microcontroller. I would love to push its bare metal capabilities to drive RGB LCD displays with touch screens, where the product budgets are really low. It should also work well with some audio applications. Have ordered one. Can’t wait to start the fun…

Suman Harapanahalli avatar

By any chance this microcontroller has a vector processor, hope this supports Tensorflow lite and others soon.

James Hughes avatar

There is already a TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers port, but there is no dedicated HW for that sort of operation.

Matt B avatar

What was the thinking behind Cortex-M0+, bespoke peripheral for integer division, optimised SW floating point routines vs a Cortex-M4F? Was this a silicone process thing?

Andreas avatar

I would also love to see this microcontroller (or another MCU) integrated directly on the board of a future Raspberry Pi 5 so that only have to buy one product to get both a single board computer and a microcontroller on the same device.

The combination could also be perfect for projects like running OctoPrint and Marlin Firmware on the same board in a DIY 3D printer or CNC machine project.

Andreas avatar

…and on future Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 IO Board as well of course ;)

Noxmiles avatar

Why should we buy this instead of a ESP32 / ESP32-C3?
Please, anybody, list some reasons.

Manish Buttan avatar

I would do a custom breakout board with the Pico and an ESP8266, pull all the GPIOs together to make a pretty sweet $5/- microcontroller power horse.

Jbeale avatar

I would expect a buying decision to be mostly based on reading the specs and the datasheet. One thing that many supercheap devices from China do not have is good documentation. This one actually has it. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico/specifications/

ben avatar

Anyone know who stocks HackSpace (in UK)
Morrison’s don’t.
and the hackspace website doesn’t say (and they’re sold out)

Ashley Whittaker avatar

Is there a WH Smith (which have been classed as essential so are still open) near you?

ben avatar

No, not really, I would need to go into the middle of the city for that, though the nearest one is in a Hospital, not the sort of place I wish to go and drive to.
I have newsagents
Waitrose, Aldi, Lidl, Morrisons and ‘local’ Sainsburys and Tesco within walking distance.
A bigger Sainsburys and yet more Aldi’s a Lidl’s within ‘cycling’ distance (i.e. less than Boris’s local to me distance ;-))

Anders avatar

Hi Ben,
I’ve been to two WHSmiths this morning and found gaps on the shelves where HackSpace should be.

Jongoleur avatar

I suspect that Hackspace will only be available at places that usually sell Hackspace. I visited my main WHSmith this morning as they opened to find that they still had several copies of the January Hackspace on display. I asked the chap putting out new magazines if the February Hackspace was in yet and he kindly looked through the stock boxes on his trolley to find them in the last box!

They had only received four copies of the mag, so I bought one to use and one to keep… Interestingly, he remembered when The Magpi came out with the Pi Zero on the cover!

Ben avatar

But I don’t know where they usually sell them, that’s why I asked. :-)

WHSmiths is no use to me and many people, there aren’t many of them around.
Where else usually sees them, which supermarkets?

Anders avatar

I’ve only ever seen it in WHSmiths.
I went back to WHSmiths and found that they had put the Hackspace on display after I visited the previous day. One person came in and bought all four copies.
So I asked them to order one in and reserve it for me, which they did. They got three more in, the other two sold immediately (again one person).

jim avatar

Congrats! looking forward to trying out the board. Along with python, would love to see rust tooling/compiler

Jonathan 'theJPster' Pallant avatar

Working on it! Will try and stream something this weekend.

Ikkaro avatar

Congratulations. I look forward to playing with the board.

Ugo avatar

The possibilities are endless and it provides wings to the imagination and a lot of motivation for the new generation, Thanks

Colin Deady avatar

Ooh that is a rather super new addition to the Pi family! Extra Brownie points for letting other companies design their own boards based around the main chip. Many thanks.

Will avatar

Nice work! Have you considered developing a Blockly style language (similar to the Microbit)? Cheers!

Simon Lukas avatar

Looks great! I have to order them as fast as possible.

Parsko avatar

Since this has more than one core, will it be possible to have more than one thread in micropython? I assume Circuitpython is not far off either?

Abel avatar

Can I use Keil to program it?. Keil has a free license to program cortex M0.

Andrew Waite avatar

I worked at IMEC in the 1990s. I would like to learn more about what they did on this project.

Warren avatar

Just when I thought my credit card was safe lol ….
Just bought 3 of them (just to start)

Lucas Morais avatar

A friend of mine has used a Raspberry Pi 3 (not sure if model B or B+) to implement network-wide ad blocking using Pi Hole. It worked pretty well for a network serving about 300 devices, not leading to any noticeable increase in DNS latency. I wonder if the Pico would also be enough, given that it features half the number of cores and 9x lower clock rate.

Marco avatar

Will Arduino-style shields be developed?

mahjongg avatar

Just wait a few months…

Edwin Shepherd avatar

Congratulations on what looks to be an amazing first micro-controller.

I havent been able to find anywhere, is camera support possible?

mahjongg avatar

With the new PIO (hardware state machines) almost certainly yes, at least concerning the camera interface.
Camera drivers will be a bit more work, but it is certainly within the range of possibility.

Leo avatar

Raspberry Pi Foundation Milestones:
First Credit Card sized Computer:Raspberry Pi 1B,
reached 2011
First “useable” Credit Card sized Computer: Raspberry Pi 4B, reached 2019
Most powerful Credit Card sized Computer: Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, reached 2020
First Keyboard Computer: Raspberry Pi 400, reached 2020
Tiniest Product: Raspberry Silicon, reached 2021
(useable as in desktop usage)

W. H. Heydt avatar

Ummm… Not only was the original Model B launch in 2012 (not 2011), but I would image the folks that made the Beaglebone would take exception to claiming that the Model B was the first CC sized SBC. That said, the Model B broke price barriers by having a list price of $35.

As for the all-in-one (computer hidden in the keyboard)…the Commodore C64 did that rather a while before the Pi400, though–again–the Pi400 is far less expensive, both in list price and even more so in inflation adjusted “real” cost.

Anders avatar

Commodore 64 turned up very late to that party. Even its own older brother Vic-20 beat it, not to mention all the others.

solar3000 avatar

Wow that’s quite a bomb drop!
A raspberry pi chip.
So, we skipped mini, micro, nano, and jumped straight into pico.
Achem…does it run linux! I know, I saw the statement.

solar3000 avatar

Talking to myself here.
I just picked up one at Micro Center. They just got the first batch in. They did not even know these exist when I asked! They took 1/2 an hour to find it. So I was the first one to get it. I paid only $1.99USD discounted from $4USD.
Better get learning.

-zeta avatar

raspberry pi – co ;-)

zeta avatar

If only it had been a thousand smaller, and someone could have persuaded it to turn a deep pink colour …
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-nano-chameleon-contender-title-world-smallest.html
it could have been a raspberry pico chameleon ;-(

Markus Storm avatar

Great! But why did you omit Wi-Fi ?
May we expect you to release a PicoW soon ?

Elfen avatar

Hoover Dam! Very interesting indeed. And for $4? It is amazing! It opens the possibilities and future of the R-Pi system and peripherals. Using MicroPython will ease programming the device as programs for the R-Pi can be easily ported over to this R-Pi Pico system. The future is looking bright… Just got to wait for the sun to rise from this dismal Pandemic the world is going through!

Tony avatar

Great news! :)

TVE avatar

DO I read correctly that the PIO peripherals cannot perform random memory accesses, for example to do a colortable lookup when sending display data out?

Eben Upton avatar

Correct. Though you could dedicate an entire M0+ to doing this and still have one left over to run your application.

W. H. Heydt avatar

Kind of boggles the mind to think of how may RP2040 chips (at 2mm*2mm) can be made from a single 30cm wafer….

This should put paid to all the “competition between Pi and Arduino” threads.

Congrats, Dr. Upton, for pulling another rabbit out of your hat.

Eben Upton avatar

1.4mm * 1.4mm of course.

-zeta avatar

Is that a 2mm diagonal?

/me gets his #digitalcalipersfromLidl ready …

Nicolas avatar

Fake news !
Here in Hong Kong your unique reseller is selling them at 8.9USD not 4USD :(
https://classroomeshop.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico?src=raspberrypi
Plus a limit of 1 Pico per order – Wonderful option for doing some testing in our Hackerspace ….

Helen Lynn avatar

Not, in fact, fake news. That price is for the board bundled with a USB cable, and the same seller has the board on its own for substantially less (https://classroomeshop.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-board-only), equating to around $5 US. The extra dollar is likely to be local taxes; while I have no idea what sales or import taxes apply in Hong Kong, a retail price like this, equivalent to $4 US plus a bit extra for local taxes, is exactly what I’d expect to see (and is what I am in fact seeing from our excellent UK Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers).

As Eben has said elsewhere, we’re not surprised to see resellers imposing a one-unit limit at the moment, to avoid scalping, and that is rightly their own decision. I imagine that once the excitement has died down it will be easier to get hold of larger quantities.

Edward Aule avatar

Please, we need a NEW RASPBERRY PI ZERO PLEASEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

horace avatar

sounds awesome! :)
what is a integer interpolator needed for? it interpolates between two integers i guess but why does it have to be in hardware? :)
and what is a hardware state machine?

James Hughes avatar

Basic interpolations require quite a number of operations, including multiplies and divides. These take a lot of instructions and therefor CPU time, so having a bit of HW to do it means you can tell the interpolators to do its work, then grab the result without having to use any processor cycles to do it. That can be a massive saving in processor time. And the these blocks are a little more sophisticated than a basic interpolator so the savings can be even higher. for more complex operations.

adrian avatar

And a linear interpolation can be used to implement a digital filter

Rahul S avatar

I wonder if it’s enough to do a mini SDR with sampling at 48 Khz without the FPU and DSP acceleration.
Wishlist for RP3000
FPU double precision
Native I2S support
DSP instructions
1 MB of RAM
400+ MHz

David Waterhouse avatar

I’d like one to have a play with, but I’m writing this shortly after 2100 (UK time) and we seem to have broken Pi Hut.

Steve avatar

Wow, I did NOT see that coming! This is quite a step in a new direction – very exciting. I really REALLY hope that we’ll see a BT/WiFi-enabled version of the pico that will sell in the $5 range; that would compete with the ESP8266/ESP32 boards that are becoming ubiquitous these days. The ESP boards are great, but sourcing them at a reasonable price can get really skeevy – there are counterfeits and poor quality-control versions of these and it can be hard to know in advance what you’re getting (not to mention shipping times of weeks or even months from China). I would much rather get a Pi Pico W from a reliable source, and impeccably documented like what you’ve done so far (yes I did see that the Arduino folks will be producing a wireless module for this, but we don’t know what the price will be).

Along those lines, I’d love to see the Pi Zero W become the baseline model at $5 dollars, and maybe just make the original Zero available on a legacy basis. As long as power is available, the Zero W is a compelling choice for most hobbyist-level projects, given its form factor and the familiarity of the RasPi environment (and the community support that goes with it).

Paul57 avatar

Checks all 4 boxes – 1. Superb Quality and support 2. Fast 3. Inexpensive 4. Sleep Mode Ultra Low Pow .. Pow.. am I reading milliamps? This puppy is gonna require its own SMR! Like Meatloaf sings ‘Now don’t be sad … Cause 3 out of 4 ain’t bad’.
Really, this is one new cool kid on the block. Now that you’re doing your own Si, can you pretty-Please get us an RPI Pico-Pwr for the next one? (just begging….)

Alan avatar

Love it. Ordered some already.

When you start thinking about version two.. I would like to make an impassioned plea that you include a ADLC serial data link.
Being able to network these on something simpler than ethernet but more sophisticated than the likes of the 8051s 9 bit serial mode would be really interesting and it’s not a feature that any other microcontroller has as far as I know. The venerable MC68B54 is the sort of thing. Compatibility with this would also keep the fans of Econet happy.
Alan

James Hughes avatar

A quick search didn’t find anything on that protocol, but if its digital its almost certainly possible to write a PIO program to implement it.

adrian avatar

It’s similar, if not identical, to HDLC. The PIO could do the IO work and maybe the bitstuffing, since it has shift instructions and conditionals

vgp avatar

Awesome !!! Another great tiny product from Rasberrypi ecosystem. Going to buy one soon.

James Feeney avatar

Fantastic! Now students can explore microcontrollers, and how they work with full fledged PCs. Nice, very nice at $4. Kids can collect soda cans to get the money for a Pico.

Jatin Gandhi avatar

Nice spec for board at this price point..,
Can anyone share CoreMark score? how well does it do w.r.t., Teensy 3.2, 3.6 and Adafruit Metro M4?

Jatin Gandhi avatar

Any RTOS off the shelf? or we need to port it?

Mike avatar

Should have made the board with wifi.
Otherwise ESP32 if cheaper and provides Wifi and bluetooth.

adrian avatar

I’d so much rather have fast I/O than wifi. It’s easy to add a wifi interface, not so easy to get the data in and out at video rates.

pixel avatar

Is it possible to run the sdk under WSL1 (obviously not WSL2 due to the Hypervisor USB limitations etc) ?

Wood Low avatar

How about the price of the RP2040? And when can we buy the chip independently?

Neil avatar

I am having some difficulty wrapping my brain around the flash interface. For a 32-bit wide architecture, XIP over QSPI, itself running at a maximum of (is it?) half the processor clock speed will be very slow. I thought maybe the QSPI/XIP interface would be sped up into the GHz range, but no. Yes the cache will help, but at best it adds only another 8k of full speed memory, once loaded. In other words, you would use XIP instructions only for background processes having no real-time constraints. Real-time processes – and their data – will have to live in the on-chip RAM (or at worst that plus 8k). Yes? No?

Chris Stagg avatar

Just noticed some unpopulated bits (not looked at the schematic fully yet) but if they are configuration pads of some kind then some delicate procidures are required.

William avatar

How about a Raspberry Pi 4B with an RP2040 built in and more pins ;). Also, the PIO is really really cool, would have been great for stepper motor control for student robotics, had an arduino controlling 4 wheels and had to work around timing loops to get it to bitbang them successfully whereas with this you can just set one SM per wheel and even have them all sharing the same few instructions.

Nic avatar

Surely an RP2040 HAT is the next product? Instead of developing yet another product (and form factor for the extra pins) to add to the RPi board itself, rather a HAT that can be used with most models that people already own.

Giles Read avatar

I have posted a hi-res X-Ray of the new Pico on Flickr at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ultrapurple/50862597256/
Enjoy looking at the tiniest details of the latest member of the Pi family!

James Adams avatar

Love it – thanks! You are right the bond wires are 20u thick, note they are made of copper rather than gold or aluminium.

Dave avatar

Hi, congratulations on another great product.
I read the spec on the RP2040 and perhaps half understood :-) It mentions that the clock uses a PLL, does that mean the 2040 clock could be syncronised to an external source with a variable frequency or have I missunderstood?
Des.

James Hughes avatar

There are a couple of clock options, you can use the internal ring oscillator (ROSC) clock, or attach an external crystal clock (XOSC). XOSC is much more accurate, so if you need decent timing you should use a crystal. Once started, you should not vary the external clock as that will upset any timers etc as they are based on a set clock speed.

Des avatar

Thanks James,
All understood re the clocking options and how a “sliding” external clock frequency could upset timings.
Regards,
Des.

dave j avatar

8 point grey body text for datasheets! Are we all supposed to have perfect eyesight and massive 4K monitors or something? No, zooming isn’t an option unless you like looking at headers and footers or only seeing part of diagrams.

James Hughes avatar

I’m currently looking at some of the daatsheets on a 1920x1200p device and they seem fine at default zoom. I even have room to zoom in to 200% without the pages hitting the edge of the screen. This is on Linux using qpdfview v0.4.18.

dave j avatar

I also use a 1920x1200p screen. You’ve missed my point about zooming. PDF layouts are page based, if you are not viewing them a page at a time it’s non-optimal. If you have to zoom in you end up endlessly scrolling to move headers/footers from the middle of the viewing area. If you are going to have to do that it would be better to have the datasheet as something like HTML or markdown where there are no headers and footers. It’s not that you can’t get at the information in the document, it’s just that zooming far less convenient – like finding a bug in a program when you can only see a few lines at once.
The low contrast grey text, particularly at such a small size, just makes it more difficult to read. Not everyone has perfect eyesight.
It’s worth noting that RPi’s previous datasheets seem to use 10 point black text.

Peter Francis avatar

James
Please remember that you have an enormous advantage at your age. Fifty years ago I could examine (no magnifiers!) pcbs a couple of inches away from the end of my nose. Accuity & accommodation deteriorate with age, and the arrival of the bolt-on extras called cataracts (**) just compounds the problem. Grey is a common “sexy/trendy” colour for web-sites and documents these days, but it most definitely makes it harder to read. I can just about read a full A4 page of the RP2040 datasheet (& BTW I’m particulary excited by chapter 3 on the PIO) in the middle of the day, but I can’t do it early morning or in the evening – my monitors are 1920×1200. So, please just acknowledge that there is a large number of people of varying visual ability who want to read what you write, and generally the more contrast the better.

** BTW, cataract surgery has almost completely stalled in the past year so we have to be patient and wait!

In the mean time, many thanks for your part in the RP2040/Pico creation and launch!

PeterF

Alan Senior avatar

I agree Dave, I like to easily read text when the page is the correct A4 size on the screen. This is one of the few documents and data sheets I have has to Zoom on. The figure captions are even less readable without using zoom. A minor point perhaps but a negative. The standard of the documentation and software sdk is otherwise top-notch for a newly released product.

Jim avatar

Unfortunately it’s still not a real-time system, which most microcontrollers are. Unless they’re coming out with a real-time OS to go with it. Otherwise it’s no good for high-speed data gathering (e.g. a few mega samples per second)

James Hughes avatar

Sorry, but that is wrong. It is a real time system. You don’t need an RTOS for a real time system, in fact, in many cases it just makes thing slightly LESS accurate because you are adding more layers of code. With the Pico and the C SDK you are writing baremetal code. It does NOT get more real time than that.

Cam avatar

This is great (and I’ve already managed to get my grubby mitts on one), but I just came to say a hearty congratulations to whoever came up with the “Raspberry Si” line above…

beta-tester avatar

nice touch, PIO state machine

Carlos A Greco avatar

Hi
Congratulations on the launch. Maybe you could think of adding WI-FI, LORA

Bakkt avatar

Wow! i really cant wait to use it with a WI-FI, LORA

Richard Creedy avatar

U3 is the 2M Flash storage on the dev board, if you have the skills, do we know which chips can be replace it to increase the storage?

8bitMicroFan avatar

Refer to 2.9 in the document “Hardware design with RP2040”. The Winbond w25q128jv (128MBit, 16MB) would work, but is difficult to solder. To make matters worse there is a tiny capacitor and a tiny resistor really close to the chip. Good luck!

Richard Creedy avatar

Kapton™ tape is good for components close to work area, hot air and solder paste also good for difficult areas

Bucket avatar

Could a Pico, with its PIO feature, be used to controll an old laptop display? Background: all other instructions for reusing laptop displays I’ve seen involve buying a custom controller board for the specific display model. So my question is: Could a Pico in theory be used as a universal replacement for such boards?

beta-tester avatar

as far as i understood the PIO can not be faster than the cpu clock cycle.
(in ideal theoretical case, one IO instruction at one clock cycle)
so i wourd guess it depends how many pixle your display has and how fast the cpu clock runs.

destroyinator666 avatar

But can it run doom?

jerry wasinger avatar

I would be very interested in getting my hands on the datasheet for the RP2040. And apologies if this question has already been asked but will it be possible to buy the ICs in quantity from distributors like Digikey and/or Mouser in the U.S.?

James Hughes avatar

The datasheet was published on release day, and yes, it will be available to purchase, keep an eye on the blog for that announcement.

Richard Creedy avatar

would the Winbond W25Q64JVSSIM TR be a viable flash chip to replace U3 (W25Q16JVUXIQ)

Mk3d avatar

Great news! Congratulations!
Add an esp8266 chip on it ;)

Andy avatar

It’s quite inconvenient to unplug the board and plug it again every time the program needs to be flashed. Is there a way to keep the board always plugged and make updates directly from the IDE?

Louis Beaudoin avatar

Is it pronounced “pee-ko” as pico usually is pronounced, or “pie-ko” to match the Pi in Raspberry Pi?

Ashley Whittaker avatar

Pee-ko ?

Andy avatar

I think the ‘bootsel’ button should reset the board and enter the USB storage mode right away, without the need to unplug the board. It is simply a bad design decision to require the user to disconnect the board for each program update.

adrian avatar

I like a physical reset button too. I guess they needed to save every penny.

However doing it this way makes the button a program-testable input, so it’s potentially more useful than just a reset. You can, of course, test it in your own program and perform the reset yourself (if your code hasn’t crashed).

James Adams avatar

This. Plus if you are doing lots of development/firmware updating you probably want to be using the SWD (debug) port anyway.

Alan Senior avatar

You can easily add a reset button. Thi saves the hassle of pulling the plug. Just add a momentary push button theat pulls down the RUN pin. In use you then:
1. Hold down the BOOTSEL button
2. Briefly press the new button to pull down RUN
3. Release the BOOTSEL button
There is no need to unplug the USB lead when this is done.

Carlos Luna avatar

You only need to unplug and plug the board to run your program in certain cases, for example if you use rshell to transfer files. If you use microPython and Thonny you can transfer you program and run it without unplugging/plugging. Same if you use circuit Python. In this case the board appears as an external storage device and you just copy your python script to that device and it runs it immediately.

Alan Senior avatar

I found you have to unplug.plug when programming with C/C++ via Visual Studio. I now have a button on the RUN pin, see post above.

Fabrice Frances avatar

Is the VGA/SDcard/Audio Demo board available somewhere ? And the Popcorn demo sources too ?
I’d love to experiment with them…

Best regards,
Fabrice

adrian avatar

VGA adapter is on the Pimoroni site listed as ‘coming soon’.

The popcorn sources are in the pico-playground repository.

Fabrice avatar

Great ! Thanks a lot !

PESARO avatar

UNFORTUNATELY I AM BEGINNER…MY DREAM IS TO BUILT TWO PICO PHONES, OR A PHONE BRIDGE WITH THIS PICO RASPBERRY

W. H. Heydt avatar

I hope you realize that the Pico has a tiny fraction of the compute power of even a (currently) obsolete phone. Even a Pi0–for nearly the same price–would blow the socks off a Pico, computation-wise.
(And while I’m at it….please release your Caps Lock. All caps makes it look like you’re shouting at people. Thanks, in advance.)

Paul Salmon avatar

This took me back to watching a BBC TV programme on microprocessors in the 1980’s, watching silicon being designed on a BBC model B at Acorn Computers.

Kanti Panchal avatar

Does Node-Red work with RPi Pico ?

Eduardo Binotto avatar

My dream is to see a Pico embedded on a Model B – The best RPi with analog I/O.

Gregg Levine avatar

Regarding development. Obviously it is possible to use a regular Raspberry Pi to develop code to be sent to a Pico, and obviously debug it using the on board debug headers. But which one? I only have a Pi3B and a couple of Pi3A devices.

Carlos Luna avatar

The Pi3B should be more than enough. Just connect the Pico to it using a USB cable and you are ready to go.

Hero avatar

Wonder full news. another awesome product from Rasberrypi ecosystem.

avra avatar

Congratulations to all of you…

James avatar

Is any expansion board or base board available for this new raspberry pi Pico microcontroller?

Adam Page avatar

Love it! I hope there is a version with pre-soldered headers (Like Zero WH) (GPIO down, debug up) alongside the normal Pico (no soldered headers). Possibly Pico H?

Florin avatar

How can I code on it using c or c++?

W. H. Heydt avatar

Got mine in yesterday. After a bit of faffing around (turned out I needed to reboot my Pi4B before the new version of thonny could find the Pico) I got the basic LED blink running.

Once again, the RPT/RPF has set a new benchmark for what your basic device–MCU in this case–should cost when produced by a reputable company that also provides proper documentation and software support.

Even as the Model B was revolutionary in its day, so–I think–the Pico will be, as well.
And, for once in a way, enough of them were made to keep them from selling out immediately! (Either that, or–very unusually–the RPT/RPF *over*estimated the initial market. But I’ll stick with the first part and hope that particular trend continues.)

Dieter avatar

Why ARM? I thought RPi Foundation is commited to open source? Wouldn’t it be great if it was based on an open source RISC V design instead? Would promote the open sourca idea on the one hand and give RISC V a huge push in the right direction if there were millions of cheap devices and a huge brand name like Raspberry out there encuraging kids to develop on RISC V…?

BlobbyDBob (aka: Anonymous) avatar

Honestly, at this point, my entire house is gonna be operational from ok gadgets alone. Who needs overclocked Windows PCs, this is much more affordable, versatile and much more enjoyable. The Raspberry Pi 3 b+ is my 1st computer, and probably the only one I’ll need for a while. I’ll invest in another one for my friends or family. Thank you Pi team!

Gabriel Florit Polanco avatar

This looks like an amazing little board to thinker around.
Also, may the new “Raspberry Silicon” mean that we can expect a custom SoC on a next iteration of the RPi, if so, I wish you guys the best and looking forward to it!

horace avatar

so i guess you didn’t do a version with wifi/bluetooth but let arduino do such a version to let arduino live? that’s very nice of you. :)

Tomas avatar

Looks like a good product. High power consumption during sleep though and datasheet very hard to read without zooming in. Look at ST, IFX, Atmel or any datasheet, then this can easily be fixed.

John Wilson avatar

Really excited to see the RPi foundation developing microcontrollers. I’m just disappointed I could buy only one. Can’t wait for their quad core micro+FPGA boards to come out!

Petros Pilichos avatar

Will we be able to buy just the IC in the future? i could see using a smaller version of this a few projects of mine!
By the way thanks for making this programmable with C and easy to flash(technically just file change).

Gigahertz avatar

Great launch!

NeilJ avatar

Great little micro, congrats to the team!
For audio I’d be looking to replace the 12 MHz crystal with a 12.288 MHz one (clean division down to 96/48 kHz without PLL noise). Would the OS have to be rebuilt to support that change?

James avatar

Nice alternative to Arduino, ESP & others. Lots less expensive than theirs. Raspberry, have you thought/considering about reducing its footprint even more. Yes all those IO pins are nice, BUT as for my projects, have used just a few IO pins per project.

Gregory avatar

Would just the RP2040 MCU be a small enough footprint for you – those chips will be on sale in a few months…

W. H. Heydt avatar

Is this https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tiny-2040 small enough for you?
(For those that don’t follow links, it’s to the up-coming $10 Pimoroni Tiny 2040.)

Elena Nieto avatar

awesome piece of equipment!!! hoping to get it soon to test it.

Lucas Morais avatar

Just a small question: should we expect to see Raspberry Silicon replacing the ARM processors found in less constrained models?

SMB Anand avatar

What is the Sink and Source capability of each of the Raspberry Pi Pico board GPIO pins.

Pallav Aggarwal avatar

Great to see Raspberry Pi getting into MCU space as well.
– Are there power consumption results available that show how low MCU can go on power consumption?
– Do we have internal HW RTC?

John Hunt avatar

I’m making a data logger project and I need to have the pico run from a battery backup supply but only when not plugged into USB, I’ve read that I need a schottky diode on the vsys input, but I’ve no idea what type to order – can anyone help? I only understand basic electronics, not so much schottky diodes. I’ve googled a lot but can’t seem to find this info presumably because the pico is so new. Thanks in advance!

Cassandra Heartwood avatar

You say you wanted 4 Analogue inputs which is what I need, but the documentation only shows 3. I’m disappointed.

JBeale avatar

The RP2040 chip itself does have 4 analog inputs, but only 3 go to external pins on the Pico board. There are other boards coming which expose all 4 analog inputs the chip has, for example https://www.adafruit.com/product/4884

Ashok Shiroya avatar

Wow. Awesome. Actually, it’s March and I got just now in India through my friend coming from US. [Just to save cost :)] I’m gonna use it for making a computerised hand blender that consists of a camera and detect whether the blending is perfect or need more run.

Mymadi avatar

Hi.. I planned to teach using this board. However any recomendded book how to teach:
1) How timers work on RP2040?
2) ADC theory based on RP2040
3) and so on… (PWM, I2C, SPI)
Meaning that, the theorytical part.

Roger J Lewis avatar

Looks nice. How about some news about when you may have sufficient supply to fill demand.

Vicky Gupta avatar

Wow that’s quite a bomb drop!
A raspberry pi chip.
So, we skipped mini, micro, nano, and jumped straight into pico.
Achem…does it run linux! I know, I saw the statement.

Qazi Anas avatar

I’m gonna use it for making a computerised hand blender that consists of a camera and detect whether the blending is perfect or need more run.

James avatar

Compares well with the ESP32 only I found the coms link to the pc was dodgy on Windows 10. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe it is the firewall. Makes transferring files to the device tricky. ESP32 had no such problems. Moving between devices was easy however in Python.

Bheem avatar

Well, RP2040 is new. But I just want to know 4 Analogue inputs or 3?

Comments are closed