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| Raspberry Pi launched a $ 4 microcontroller |
The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched Raspberry Pi Pico, a small, fast, and versatile board that lets you create hardware projects and run code with a microcontroller.
The Raspberry Pi uses its own RP2040 chip, which is a new microcontroller chip developed in the UK.
The RP2040 chipset houses a 133MHz dual-core Arm Cortex-M0 + processor with 264KB internal RAM and 16MB of out-of-chip memory.
There are 26-pin GPIO including 3 analog ports, a micro-USB port, and a temperature sensor. It does not come with WiFi or Bluetooth support. The price is $ 4.
Like other microcontrollers, the Raspberry Pi Pico has dozens of input and output pins on either side of the device.
These pins are important because they act as an interface to other components so that you can allow the microcontroller to interact with the LEDs, get data from different sensors, display information on the screen, etc.
The chip includes a variety of input and output options including I2C, SPI, and PIO to support endless applications in this small package.
Microcontrollers are used to control other components or other devices. While you can use a regular Raspberry Pi to control it, microcontrollers are specially designed to interact with other things.
You can then use this electronic prototype base to avoid soldering and start developing your project, and you can pair it with a small battery that can run for weeks or even months.
Unlike a computer, a microcontroller does not run a traditional operating system and its code is executed directly by the chip.
You can connect the device to the computer via the micro USB port and then turn on the Raspberry Pi Pico while pressing the button. The device will then appear as an external drive on the computer.
The Raspberry Pi Pico Board can be programmed via C and MicroPython and is suitable for a wide variety of applications and difficulty levels.
Raspberry Pi hopes to give others a chance to take advantage of the chip design, as it has been in contact with Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, and Sparkfun so that they can use the RP2040 chip to build their own circuit boards and take care of all the devices that can run with the RP2040 system chip.