Anyone's gonna give the RPi Pico2 a go? New RPi under 5€
So, Raspberry is gonna release a new RPi "Pico2" for just under 5€. Anyone's gonna play with that?
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new-5-microcontroller-board-on-sale-now/
https://pico.raspberrypi.org/getting-started/
https://www.reichelt.com/raspberry-pi-pico-2-rp235x-cortex-m33-microusb-rasp-pi-pico-2-p383358.html
Specs:
Specification
Dual Arm Cortex-M33 or dual Hazard3 processors @ 150MHz520 KB on-chip SRAM
Software- and hardware-compatible with Raspberry Pi Pico 1
Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB
Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards
Robust and fully documented security features:
Optional boot signing, enforced by on-chip mask ROM, with key fingerprint in OTP
Protected OTP storage for optional boot decryption key
Global bus filtering based on Arm or RISC-V security/privilege levels
Peripherals, GPIOs, and DMA channels individually assignable to security domains
Hardware mitigations for fault injection attacks
Hardware SHA-256 accelerator
2 × UART2 × SPI controllers
2 × I2C controllers
24 × PWM channels
4 x ADC channels
1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
12 × PIO state machines
Open source C/C++ SDK, MicroPython support
Operating temperature -20°C to +85°C
Supported input voltage 1.8–5.5V DC
Comments
i will probbaly get some (I've been using the rp2040 version) but from my perspective the upgrades mostly aren't that important. the rp2040 is already quite overpowered for a microcontroller. The new features are interesting and might be fun to play with but at the moment I don't have a real use for them. i guess when the wireless version arrives, it would make a nice FIDO2 token with the new security features.
I don't have the pico 1 specs in front of me but I think the main changes are
1) new processor (Cortex M33 / Risc-V hybrid). M33 has single precision FP plus some weird add-on for double precision. Not sure about the Risc-V part.
2) cpu chip has 2x the ram as before
3) Pico board has 2x the flash (4MB instead of 2MB) as before
4) cpu chip has three PIO instead of two, I mean why three? People wanted more than 2, but the things are tiny, why not put on 100 or something? Like one for every GPIO pin on the chip.
5) The new OTP and secure boot stuff, and the TRNG, useful for some security stuff, ok
New cpu did is around 2.5x the size of the old one. I wonder how power consumption is affected.
If anyone is interested in "embedded" programming, the Atmega microcontrollers retail for 3€ shipping included; they can be programmed in c++ and do pretty much everything except network (usb, uart, analog, audio, ...).
Those are definitely fun if someone has enough time to look into them.
As for the Raspberry computers, I never liked to depend on an sdcard for the root filesystem. Before SSDs became popular and cheap, I had my notebook with root on an sdcard for a couple of years; it was constant i/o errors or timeouts and the cards degraded quite frequently needing a replacement every few months.
Slightly off the topic, but I have a 5 at home that I run from an NVMe using one of the HATs to avoid SD cards, been running that for a while now and I find it makes quite a big difference in use!
That microcontroller from Raspberry Pi is quite powerful. I might buy one, but just for play, because I don't have time nor ideas for something serious to use it for.
No bluetooth nor wifi. I'll stick to ESPs
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I will wait for version with WiFi chip.
That could be useful for controlling smart lights, AC, fans and whatnot, if it only had wifi. Right now I have this box that contains a triac and an Atmega8a and it works as a speed regulator for the room fan; it's plugged to a laptop via USB, and the laptop is connected to the smartphone via wifi. Basically the fan can be controlled from the smartphone; it can do faster / slower / power off / power on, like a dimmer for the lights, but it's for the fan. Yet I don't see much of a point in a Raspberry Pi for this, even if it had wifi, I could buy an entire laptop for 20€, with monitor, keyboard, wifi and PSU and have the same functions. And the laptop would also come enclosed in a chassis!
Even though this chip is quite an evolution, with the lack of WiFi it does not look great in comparison to chips like ESP8266. I see it more useful for complex programming, but then again it depends what consumers need or what they imagine to achieve.
So far I found ESP8266 more than enough with Tasmota installed for my needs.
Already have way to many rasp-like things lying around.
The Radxa X4 looked interesting though
Hmmm what the hell?
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The Pico is not anything like a full sized pi. It's more like an Arduino Nano with a much more powerful processor. There is 4MB of QSPI flash on the board, and no SD card. Plus there is 520K of RAM on the cpu chip. That's the new Pico 2. The original Pico had 2MB of flash and 260K of RAM and slower cpu cores, but was otherwise generally the same idea.
Neither version of the Pico has wireless directly on the cpu chip the way that Espressif chips do. There is a wireless version of the Pico 1 that has a separate wireless chip on the board. As I remember it is around $2 more than the base version. They are going to do similar for the Pico 2 but it is not out yet.
I bought a lot of Pico 1 before. Then most of them are idle.
So this time maybe I should not buy. But I feel I can not stop myself. I'm a toy collector
I have owned a few RPIs. I don't know anything about QSPI flash. 4MB is enough for "floppy linux" builds, but the RAM might be a problem? https://fdlinux.com/about.php
I think all the software would be compiled thru its SDK and be custom-written for the hardware, so the amount of memory would be adequate for the purpose. I'm using an AVR with 1 KB of RAM memory... that sounds like a ridiculous amount but it's plenty, it is 1000 variables at 8 bits each, or 500 variables 16 bits each (the compiler handles this abstraction).
Radxa Zero 3W also has nice HW for its size
Again, a Pico is not the same as a Raspberry Pi; you're not going to be running linux or anything similar on it (not least down to the lack of an MCU). It's a microcontroller, not a computer.
Is this flash storage similar to those USB thumb drives that require to be periodically powered up to refresh the memory cells or they lose data eventually? I can't find the specifics.
The Atmega datasheets are clear on this, they claim that those EEPROMs have 100 years of data retention according to accelerated-aging tests. I friend of mine built a phone answering machine with an Atmega 20 years ago and as far as we know it still works. Or at least he presumes, because who does still have a landline...
The hardware spec seems to be still limited so no normal linux would work directly.
But
Something like Fuzix (a tiny Unix, similar to Linux) works ,
http://cowlark.com/2021-02-16-fuzix-pi-pico/
also there is a crazy solution that making it as a RISC-V emulator for running Linux on.
https://github.com/tvlad1234/pico-rv32ima
I heard they replaced all the flash with mercury delay lines.