Raspberry Pi Pico 4$ Microcontroller

Raspberry Pi has developed several microprocessor-based development board which are famous as single board computers.

But, this time Raspberry pi has launched a microcontroller-based development board “Raspberry pi Pico” which uses inhouse designed “RP2040” microcontroller.

The RPi Pico Board

The Pico board is a 51mm X 21mm board with a RP2040 microcontroller on it with 26 multi functional 3.3v GPIO pins.

The board has an onboard LED and a boot select button and a micro USB female port to connect with computer to program and power via USB.

The RP2040

The RP2040 is a new microcontroller developed by Raspberry Pi.

Key Specifications of RP2040

• Dual ARM Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
• 264kB on-chip SRAM in six independent banks
• Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
• DMA controller
• Fully-connected AHB crossbar
• Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
• On-chip programmable LDO to generate core voltage
• 2 on-chip PLLs to generate USB and core clocks
• 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
• Peripherals
  • UARTs
  • 2 SPI controllers
  • ◦ 2 I2C controllers
  • 16 PWM channels
  • USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
  • 8 PIO state machines

Like every product RP2040 signifies the specification of the microcontroller.

• “RP” means raspberry pi
• “2” cores
• “0” ARM M0+ architecture
• “4” is floor(log2(ram/16k)) RAM
• “0” is floor(log2(nonvolatile/16k))

Programming the Raspberry Pi pico

Pico supports 2 programming languages “Micro Python” and “C/C++”.

To know more about Programming the Pico you can check out there amazing and extensive user friendly guide at “Getting Started with Pico”