Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces 4$ Pi Pico Microcontroller

Raspberry Pi, this word has been a hot topic since it has been released. And now we have a new member to this family. A micro-controller with a price as cheap as a box of raspberries, about $4.  

This microcontroller which is named Pi Pico is the first of its kind and the Raspberry Pi foundation has built its own chip for this microprocessor.

Named Raspberry Pi Pico with chip RP2040, the controller has a dual-core ARM133 MHz processor with a 264KB of RAM, a micro-USB port along with the facility of a temperature sensor. Having a 2MB flash memory inbuilt and with a capacity to expand up to 16MB, this is also coming with 30 general-purpose input/output pins which allow a wide variety of connections of hardware.  

We know Raspberry for its imaginative, complex and mind-boggling innovations and creations. DIYs have used these for many attractive tools like face recognitions, mini-drones, and many more.

We’ve heard of Pi in the Sky project, which captures spectacular atmospheric images aboard a weather balloon. Beatbox is one more that lets us create a rhythm for our music. Tea-Pi brews you a cup of tea. A lot of other uses of this just amaze us.

The Raspberry Pi Pico has no built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The primary objectives with RP2040  were to have high performance with a flexible output/input system which could be connected to a variety of external devices and be available at a low cost. 

The power supply for this chip is very low (around 1.8-5.5 volts), so devices can now run on a couple of AA batteries or a single lithium-ion cell. The foundation added that they build the chip RP2040 on the foundations and lessons that they’ve learned from using other products.  

Micro-controllers are specifically designed to interact with other devices. These are cheap and use little power, making us use these to develop our own project without dirtying our hands for soldering. We can run these for weeks or even months with the help of a small battery itself. These don’t run on traditional Operating systems and the code is directly run on the chip.  

And if you want to grab one free copy of the microprocessor, subscribe to the physical edition of HackSpace magazine and get your copy with this month’s edition.

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