Raspberry Pi Pico

One thing I dont understand why would Paul have any interest in the Raspberry Pi Pico as that is not his product and dont give him any income, and specially if it dont have any security functions.
If there is something that needs a port is the Raspberry pi zero as that have a lot of ram.

Or maybe there is something I'm missing.
 
Always be interested in the competition. Even if you think "that's not very competitive because ..."
 
Always be interested in the competition

The other person could say: Focus on your core product/business. High-performance microcontrollers in tiny user-friendly package. Why would anyone bother to think about yet another 12-year old Cortex M0? Did you guys check the timings for floating point operations on this pico?

Function ROM/SDK (μs) - page 22 of "Pico C/C++ SDK" https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/sdk/pico_c_sdk.pdf
__aeabi_fadd 72.4μs
__aeabi_fsub 86.7μs

72 μs to do float addition? This is laughable. Teensy 4 is doing float addition in 1-2 cycles @600MHz (something like 1.6-3.2 nanoseconds)
 
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The thing is indeed underpowered - but .vs. a 48 MHz T_LC it has much more RAM and FLASH and plus two usable cores at 133 MHz.

This RP2040 is way better than any AVR used for Teensy - how does that float math compare to a 96 MHz T_3.2 or the T_LC? And who know when an updated M4 or other version will be dropped?


Prior notes alluded to value to examine ... If they develop a good system for using the two cores as the next Teensy may have two cores. Also maybe some build emulation (outside Arduino?) and library support could lead to disenchanted PICO buyers moving to Teensy ...


SFun had 250+ PICO's yesterday - today sold out. I dropped two in my cart that will have to wait. That $4 price point for anything more usable than what Arduino offers good promise versus $15 or more for any UNO or other.

Like SFun AdaF has RP2040 based units listed but only "Coming Soon" with no list price. AdaFruit had PICO's in stock at $4 a couple of hours ago - now all gone - and they have 5 left at $5 when male headers are included - oh wait they went out of stock before I posted this.

PICO's are on Amazon for $13+ ( one is 28.80 with shipping )
 
My first impression is this is absolutely a SAMD21 killer.

That's a good insight.
My go to form factor for SAMD21 is the Seeedstudio XIAO (small with castellations)
already improved on by Adafruit.

I just saw a picture of their RP2040 based-board in that form factor.
For Circuit Python applications I would seriously consider going for it.
What really matters (as you have shown us with teensyduino) is the software
and whether we can reuse someone's work on a peripheral chip or application algorithm.
They may be able to grow a strong library quickly because it's price is making it
very popular.
 
Today sold out.

"Brand" effect. Everything that has name "Raspberry Pi" on it gets media coverage. Every web site talks circles about it and praises it as it was the best thing since sliced bread. They don't mention things like Black Pills. They only compare to Arduino UNO (easy win). So crowds go with advertising.

If Teensy 4 got that kind of media coverage as Raspberry Pi Pico it would sell 100x more than now. Its all about the hype.
 
Yes, marketing is critical - which is why inferior technical specs don't mean non-competitive.
 
Not finding a 'Single RP2040' purchase item.

But I do see the REAL cost of buying bulk PI ZERO's - versus the buy one only loss leader purchase of $5 or $10:
RASPBERRY PI ZERO BCM2835 EVAL $18.83000

RASPBERRY PI ZERO W BCM2835 $24.87000
 
The RaspberryPi Pico has a few nice features:

a) 2 cores (and an easy API to control them).
b) Banked RAM, to allow parallel RAM access.
c) PIO... I wish all microcontrollers had this.
-edit- d) Low price...


I won’t be giving up my Teensy 4 any time soon, I like 600Mhz of CPU headroom and real floats... but the above 3 features mean I will be getting an RPi Pico, and I think the Teensy range will have a serious competitor when they add faster cores into the range.

-edit2- I do also really like their C/C++ based build system and API, I’ve never really delved into the underlying compiler work on the Teensy platform as I’m relatively comfortable using the Arduino (with Teensy extensions) build and editor (ok, no one actually likes the Arduino editor) system.
 
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Yes, marketing is critical - which is why inferior technical specs don't mean non-competitive.

Also, for most projects the RP Pico will be more than sufficient. For more demanding tasks one could purchase a Teensy 3.x or 4.x.
 
Personally, I don't tend to think of the microcontroller market and dev boards as a war or conflict.

And yeah, since the beginning with Teensy 1.0 in 2008, the situation has always been that you could get cheaper boards but Teensy offered higher performance (back then, almost nobody offered native USB, and those who did had horribly low-level software).
 
My gut feeling is that there will be a future RaspberryPi SBC which will have this chip uC integrated... possibly taking over the GPIO exposed on the board?
 
The Hacksoace #39 magazine (free download) PDF link before has 15 pages of PICO images and details and an then interview/pics with the raspberry Boss on pages 54 to 61 (for 2 pages of Q&A). They spent 3-4 Million Pounds developing the purposeful MCU to complement the rPi that uses 10x less power than a Pi Zero - and 100X when idling - and handy enough their PICO books use an rPi to demo the programming:
ebenupico.png

Arduino is all built on c/C++ with toolchain PJRC installs - and has many ways to run it outside Arduino IDE - including PJRC provided MAKE file. Here I do a CMD line batch file build from a Windows GUI editor - that uses the actual Arduino builder - which I set up the other week to run under Notepad++ though I use SublimeText that was good enough to pay for. But the great thing about Arduino - even adding TeensyDuino installer is that two installs ( unless it is the newer MAC mono PJRC installer ) and you have a working system just like everyone here on the forum can do for a common baseline. The editor maybe simplistic or odd - but it works for code sharing using those known/tested tools.
 
I wonder what portion is license fees to ARM?

We obviously don’t know the “arrangements” that the RaspberryPi Foundation has with various organisations... but we do know that Eben Upton is a GPU designer at ARM, and they have VERY close links with both ARM and Broadcom... I expect some deal was reached, that might not be available to other organisations ;)
 
Wow, I knew it was expensive, but I didn't imagine it was *that* expensive!

Intel took 4 years and $100 Million to make the 386 CPU ( 1985 ). Requirements up to then were 2nd chip source for machine inclusion - so Intel licensed prior chips to Fujitsu and AMD ... but not the 386. So IBM wouldn't use it at first ... But Compaq did and took the lead.
From : uTube > Intel - From Inventors of the CPU to Laughing Stock [Part 1]

<EDIT> :: Critical note was wrong IBM would not use the 386 at first - when Compaq did and took over the market.
 
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