Arduino alternative - $ 4 Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller

On the official website of the Raspberry Pi companyFoundation announced the first product in the microcontroller class. The new Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller is priced at just $ 4, which will allow the product to compete successfully with similar devices on the market, such as the Arduino Nano microcontrollers for DIY gadgets.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller board based onbased on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller chip. It is designed as a low-cost, high-performance microcontroller board with flexible digital interfaces. The main task of the new device is to provide high performance of integer computing, enhanced connectivity of external devices and low cost. The Raspberry Pi Pico board measures just 51mm by 21mm, with an incredibly powerful little 40nm chip (two square millimeters) housed in a 7mm x 7mm QFN-56 package.

Raspberry Pi Pico is powered by dual ARM coresCortex-M0 + clocked at up to 133MHz, 264KB SRAM, and 2MB on-board flash. A USB 1.1 connector is used to support the device. There are 26 multi-function GPIO pins and a wide variety of interface options (2 × SPI, 2 × I2C, 2 × UART, 3 × 12-bit ADC, 16 PWM controllable channels). Supports up to 16 MB of external flash memory via the QSPI bus.

In addition to Pico's powerful hardware resourceshas diverse and complete software support and community resources. It comes with the complete official C / C ++ SDK for Rasberry Pi, Micropython SDK. There are 8 Programmable Input / Output (PIO) state machines to support configurable peripherals.

RP2040 with two fast cores and large volumeRAM is an excellent platform for machine learning applications. The Raspberry Pi also collaborated with partners from Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni and Sparkfun to create many accessories for the Raspberry Pi Pico running on the RP2040 platform. A joint project with HackSpace publishes a magazine issue with a free Raspberry Pi Pico and many guides and tutorials to help budding inventors