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I love the work of the Raspberry Pi foundation. They have changed the market with their innovation and the fact that their hardware has staying power and a huge
by Renaud 5y ago
I love the work of the Raspberry Pi foundation. They have changed the market with their innovation and the fact that their hardware has staying power and a huge amount of support.
Some will object that none of this is the best hardware or that there are cheaper solutions but it doesn't really matter because basically none of the alternatives have such breadth of support.
You can get and Orange Pi or Banana Pi or cheap arduino clone for cheaper and some have better spec but invariably you will end up with a partially implemented SDK, linux images that won't be updated and drivers that often don't really work.
There are exceptions but with things like the Compute Module 4, you get all the advantage of a widely supported platform with the flexibility of building it in your product and knowing it will be supported for many years (if you can get your hands on it though).
The Pico is in the same vein: it has some innovative aspects, like the PIO and lots of RAM but it's basically a dual core Cortex M0+, just like another gazillion micros.
The difference is that it's extremely well documented out of the box; it took years for the ESP chips to get any decent documentation. It also comes with a boot loader and has support for at least C SDK, CircuitPython and MicroPython and there is basically no limit to implement other interpreted language platforms. Switching from one system the other is as easy as copying a file onto a USB drive and rebooting the pico.
Most small projects don't need Wifi. The ESP32 is great for that if you need it.
The RP2040 is also cheap. The Rpi foundation doesn't make a profit and they work hard at ensuring the hardware is as cheap as it can be. At USD1 it's a very competitive offering for something so versatile.
Now the main issue is going to be availability. They only make 40,000 units available for the next 3 months. It's basically a box of a few dozen rolls. A drop in the ocean.
With their usual success and the current supply chain issues, it's going to take months before it becomes widely available. Pretty sure we'll still be struggling to by more than 10 units at a time at this time next year...