Raspberry Pi Pico: The $4 advanced Microcontroller based on RP2040 Dual Core ARM Cortex-M0+

Raspberry Pi Foundation is a research and development company that never fails to surprise its users with advanced products. On the 21st of January, Raspberry Pi came up with a powerful and advanced micro-controller at the economical price of $4. Raspberry Pi Foundation came into the market intending to provide affordable, High-Performance, and programmable products so that more people can learn about programming. At the start of the year 2021, Raspberry Pi launched its powerful micro-controller “Raspberry Pi Pico” with ultra-modern features like RP2040 Dual Core ARM Cortex-M0+ clocked at 133MHz, 256KB RAM, 30 GPIO pins, and a broad range of interfacing options.

RP2040

Raspberry Pi developed RP2040, a technologically advanced Dual-Core ARM microcontroller that would make the users work efficiently. Raspberry Pi Pico is paired with 2MB of onboard QSPI Flash memory for code and data storage. Raspberry Pi designed RP2040 or Raspberry Pi Pico as a free-standing system with powerful peripherals, memory, and processor that a user can utilize into an embedded system. It would provide new degrees of freedom to MCU users that would increase the horizon of the users. The post-fix numeral on RP2040 comes from the following

Number of processor cores
Loosely which type of processor (M0+)
floor(log2(ram / 16k))
floor(log2(non-volatile / 16k)) or 0 if no onboard non-volatile storage

Specifications

RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the United Kingdom
Dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor, the flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
264kB of SRAM, and 2MB of onboard Flash memory
The castellated module allows soldering directly to carrier boards.
USB 1.1 Host and Device support
Low-power sleep and dormant modes
Drag & drop programming using mass storage over USB
26 multi-function GPIO pins
2×SPI, 2×I2C, 2×UART, 3×12-bit ADC, 16×controllable PWM channels
Accurate clock and timer on-chip
Temperature sensor
Accelerated floating-point libraries on-chip
8×Programmable IO (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support.

RP2040 Block Diagram

The basic idea behind the development of Raspberry Pi Pico is to enhance the experience of users with hardware and software. It is a powerful product with advanced peripherals that made it perfect for users that want to explore hardware by using their creativity. If you want to understand Raspberry Pi Pico deeply then check the block diagram mentioned below

In Raspberry Pi Pico Debug is available via the SWD interface and Internal SRAM is arranged in banks that can contain code or data and is accessed via dedicated AHB bus fabric connections, allowing bus masters to access separate bus slaves without being stalled. A user can run Raspberry Pi Pico GPIO pins directly, or from a variety of dedicated logic functions as per their requirements and resources. Raspberry Pi Pico is comprised of DMA bus masters to offload repetitive data transfer tasks from the processors. There are Flexibly configurable PIO controllers that can be used to provide a wide variety of IO functions which would provide a better experience to the users.

Programming Language

A user can configure the Raspberry Pi Pico as per their knowledge of their programming language. One can program Raspberry Pi PICO by using following languages

micro python
C/C++ sdk
Python.

Applications

A lot of new users of electronics components might have questions about the applications of the Raspberry Pi Pico. The development team of the Raspberry Pi Pico provided powerful components within the Raspberry Pi Pico that made infinite possibilities for the users to create a variety of projects. If you still do not have any idea about the things that can be done with the help of Raspberry Pi Pico then you can make the following projects