18 ms·
Raspberry Pi Pico W: your $6 IoT platform
- oger 4y agoAnd the came the ESP32-C5 RISC-V IoT MCU which supports dual-band (!!) WiFi 6 (!), Bluetooth 5.0 LE… As much as I like the Pico, it seems that Espressif is (finally) upping its game. Dual band is highly relevant especially in hight density areas with crowded 2.4 GHz bands.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hacknews20 4y agoAwesome innovation and regardless of what is open and what is proprietary the key is that it is a platform enabling thousands of others, price point and accessibility is creating conditions for product market fit.
- love2read 4y ago> Eagle-eyed readers of datasheets will notice that CYW43439 supports both Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low-Energy: we have not enabled Bluetooth on Pico W at launch, but may do so in the future. Why wait?
- rickdeckard 4y agoAnd delay the whole product launch until also the Bluetooth-stack has reached maturity?
- synack 4y agoMy guess is either they're awaiting certification or the drivers aren't finished yet.
- puzzlingcaptcha 4y agoThis is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but arguably a lot of stuff in pico-playground or pico-extras is not finished and left as exercise for the reader. This is fine if you already know what you are doing but not so much when it's marketed as 'baby's first uC'.
- teruakohatu 4y ago> baby's first uC Is it though? Seems to me the marketing, especially this announcement, pushes it for commercial users.
- puzzlingcaptcha 4y agoFrom the 2021 press release: "To help you get the most of your Pico, why not grab a copy of Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico by Gareth Halfacree and our very own Ben Everard. It’s ideal for beginners who are new (or new-ish) to making with microcontrollers." https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2280/2293/products/068-069_720x.png https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2280/2293/products/068-069...
- lonjil 4y ago> but arguably a lot of stuff in pico-playground or pico-extras is not finished Arguably? They straight up say that the things in those repos are unfinished or otherwise not good enough for the SDK.
- puzzlingcaptcha 4y agoYes, and the wording implies that as they mature they would be merged into the SDK. Yet 18 months after release there was nothing done save for some minor janitorial fixes. Not to mention the lack of any sort of documentation.
- geerlingguy 4y agoIt's the latter—they didn't have time to finish up the software interface, but I've been told that's pretty much the next priority post-launch.
- antirez 4y agoGreat news, I played with the Pi Pico a few months ago: the idea was to make certain 3D printing products I produce not just dumb miniatures, but "alive", doing something. The Pi Pico price point and capabilities were perfect, but the lack of wireless capabilities AND the fact there is no display with a sane price point, made the project economically impossible.
- ogoffart 4y agoI've been using the Pico to drive a screen successfully: https://slint-ui.com/blog/porting-slint-to-microcontrollers.html https://slint-ui.com/blog/porting-slint-to-microcontrollers....
- antirez 4y agoSure, it can drive screens without issues. The problem is the cost of the screen. If I'm selling, right now, a plastic miniature for $20, if I can make it "smart" and selling it for $30 or $35, that's ok, but $50? Nope.
- ogoffart 4y agoyou can get screens for under 10$ eg https://www.waveshare.com/pico-lcd-1.3.htm https://www.waveshare.com/pico-lcd-1.3.htm or https://www.waveshare.com/pico-lcd-0.96.htm https://www.waveshare.com/pico-lcd-0.96.htm
- Nursie 4y agoHow much screen do you want? Have a dig round on aliexpress, some of them are dirt cheap if you want a small TFT, and some are designed specifically for use from the pico.
- josu 4y agoThis one is $2: https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005002438086706.html https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005002438086706.html
- 4y ago
- teruakohatu 4y agoIf I understand it correctly, it uses the closed-source library libcyw43 from MicroPyton to communicate with the hardware chip. The library is closed source, I think, because it uses propriety Cypress code. Cypress apparently since released source code and the author had considered releasing an open source version of the library but it never eventuated. See this discussion from 2019: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/4669#discussion_r307131392 https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/4669#discuss... Seems bizarre to me that rpi didn't just create a non-proprietary library.
- Zenst 4y agoMaybe a few factors at play here: Wireless/RF drivers tend to be closed source for what I understand gets down to bad code can cause RF no noes. Hopefully somebody more knowlegable will chip in upon that though it is common (sadly) for your mobile driver to be some closed blob. They may also be working on such a library and still need a lot of work, which could be why BT/BTE is not enabled as is though mooted at a later date. Might also be that the community is large and momentomous enough that the hope is that they will produce the goods in open source spirit. Certainly the whole graphics driver stack upon the RPi's seems to be going down both those last two paths in it's open source flavour.
- unwind 4y agoAll true, but the radio chip [1] has two on-board ARM cores (an M3 for Wi-Fi and an M4 for BT) each with separate ROMs. So I would assume the library just interfaces with the chip and tells it what to do, not implement low-level radio protocols and so on. Weird that such a library is closed source, on the other hand. Annoying. :( Edit: forgot to include the link to the radio chip. [1]: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/wireless-connectivity/airoc-wi-fi-plus-bluetooth-combos/cyw43439/ https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/wireless-connectivit...
- Zenst 4y agoVery useful - so does the wifi chip have faster ARM cores than the RP2040 microcontroller which has M0+ cores is what I'm wondering now.
- tn890 4y ago$6? more like $60 coming to a scalper near you.
- benj111 4y agoThe rp2040 isn't really in short supply, so no it probably is $6
- Nursie 4y agoYou can get RP2040 based boards now for a handful of dollars. I've been working with a RP2040-zero (third party board) on an epaper side-project for the last few weeks. They're a lot more plentiful than the mainstream Pi boards.
- HWR_14 4y agoThe eternal question of people working on epaper projects: have the panels finally become reasonably priced?
- geerlingguy 4y agoHeh, it seems like affordable epaper and fusion energy are on the same plane of existence. Maybe one of them will become a reality in my lifetime.
- Nursie 4y agoI spent about $85 (AUD) on mine, it's a 5.83-inch tri-color (black/white/red), 648x480 display. For that much it came with the interface board so I could wire the display to my microcontroller easily enough. I think that's reasonable cost-wise for my purposes (I'm making a status display to go inside my white-build gaming 'rig' to look shiny). Red takes about 12 seconds to refresh, AFAICT I should be able to get sub-1s black updates. You can get 7-color versions for about the same price but the refresh on those is very slow. As ever it depends what you want to do - If you want a 2-inch tri-color display, in a format where you can attach SPI wires easily, you might get away with $20 AUD. You can find small greyscale eink displays very cheap (sub-$1) like this - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555154992.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555154992.html But you'll need to find some sort of interface from the ribbon cable to whatever wires you need. If you want full-color, fast-update e-ink/epaper, that's just filtering into the market AFAICT, and it's much more pricey. I can find a 31.5 inch full-color epaper display for about $2200(US)! (There's a video of it in action here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPnJh4QcjDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPnJh4QcjDY)
- benj111 4y agoIt seems to me that the Pico is what the pi should have been all along. The pi was designed to get kids into computers. The pi is now powerful enough that you can use it as a pc almost. The Pico forces you to engage with it in a different way. Plus the pio and other hardware stuff opens up possibilities for hardware stuff.
- lixtra 4y agoThe pi is almost self contained. The pico is a piece of e-waste without a proper computer to program it. So start wit the pi.
- the__alchemist 4y agoCould you go a little deeper into what you mean by this? What is a proper computer in this context? How standalone must an electronics device be to be valuable? Should all embedded devices be self-programmable?
- skybrian 4y agoI think they're just being snarky with the e-waste thing. The way you program a Pico is by plugging it into the USB port on another computer. Once programmed, it can run on battery power. It's similar to Arduino boards. You can use Arduino or PlatformIO if you like, or alternately Micropython or CircuitPython.
- grumbel 4y agoI'd say both of them missed the target by quite lot. The original idea for the Pi was to be a modern BBC Micro. But the Pi turned out to be just a regular PC. A little cheaper, less powerful and ARM. But it doesn't really do much that you couldn't also do with a PC. It doesn't have the magic of turning it on and ending up on a BASIC prompt. It doesn't bring you closer to the hardware. It has all the complexities of a PC. Meanwhile the Pico is just a regular old MCU. It doesn't have anything that you would associate with a home computer, no keyboard, no way to connect a display, no swappable storage, can't be it's own development platform, etc. It's not something you'd ever want to have as your first computer. You need a real computer to even get any use out of it. A project like the CommanderX16[1] feels a lot closer to the original goal. As it's just a home computer build modern components. [1] https://www.commanderx16.com/ https://www.commanderx16.com/
- geerlingguy 4y agoAnother bit of interesting news that came across my feed this morning: ESPHome is working on supporting the Pico (and Pico W) in an upcoming release[1]. I played around with the in-progress branch for the Pico and it already works fine[2]. Having ESPHome support the Pico W would make it very easy to integrate it into my Home Assistant setup like I do with various ESP8266 devices currently. [1] https://twitter.com/esphome_/status/1542402677539078144 https://twitter.com/esphome_/status/1542402677539078144 [2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/esphome-on-raspberry-pi-pico https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/esphome-on-raspberry-...
- mobilio 4y agoFinally a good competitor to ESP8266
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- justsomeguy123 4y agoIs Pico their attempt at breaking away from Broadcom? I am still waiting some better IO connectors so I can connect an SSD to RPi.
- geerlingguy 4y agoI don't think so—the RP2040 has a couple very slow Cortex-M0 cores, and it's not anywhere near the capability of the BCM2711. I'd imagine if Raspberry Pi were to try their hand at their own SoC chip, it would be someday in the future when RISC-V designs have matured enough to make a suitable successor. Otherwise, making a chip as complex as a modern SoC requires a lot of resources a smaller company like Raspberry Pi just doesn't have at their disposal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- crest 4y agoAnd if TSMC pushes them from 40nm to 28nm the M0+ cores and SRAM should scale to even higher clock rates without drawing too much power. While the RP2040 is "only" specified at up to 133MHz it has been reported stable at over twice that. From the scattered reports at least the AHB-lite bus matrix, SRAM and CPU cores are stable up to ~400MHz which more than compensates for the lower per clock throughput on anything but floating point heavy code. The RP2040 isn't perfect, but it's a good starting point for more capable/specialised chips e.g. variants with high speed USB, 100Mb/s MAC, just scaled up (four M0+ cores, 8way interleaved memory banks, additional PIO and DMA engines, dual QSPI). Just upgrading to a good dual QSPI peripheral would make the chip more versatile allowing users to choose between different external memory configuration like SPI flash and PSRAM or higher combined flash read bandwidth.
- klelatti 4y agoThe barrier to a PI SoC is the non CPU components - which are proprietary to companies like Broadcom. I’m sure that RPi could happily license an Arm core - indeed they have with the Pico - and the existence or otherwise of RISC-V cores is beside the point.
- polskibus 4y agoWhat’s the power usage of this device? How long can it work connected to Wi-Fi on a small battery? It would be awesome if it also supported zigbee and /or the new smart home standard “Matter”.
- geerlingguy 4y agoI don't have detailed data yet (thanks to a hospital stay when I was going to do power testing), but an informal test shows approximately 80 mA (@ 5.14v) under a WiFi / web page load test (from my review[1]). At idle, while connected to WiFi, it's under 10 mA, but I haven't had time to do any detailed testing, so take those numbers with a grain of salt. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/raspberry-pi-pico-w-brings-wifi-6 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/raspberry-pi-pico-w-b...
- jsiepkes 4y agoWould you by any chance know of a similar board with Z-Wave or Zigbee?
- geerlingguy 4y agoOne new model of the ESP32 does, though I don't think it's coming until later this year.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoI still can't understand why it took the Western world 8 years to produce an alternative to ESP8266.
- bigcheesegs 4y agoI'm surprised there's no 802.15.4/Thread support on a new IoT platform in 2022. Also the power consumption makes this mostly useless for battery operation. Overall I'm still not impressed by the 2040. I'll stick with the NRF52840.
- akelly 4y agoIt's not a new chip, it's the same RP2040 chip with a Cypress (now Infineon) CYW43439 WiFi controller. Which isn't available to buy in single quantities at costs $4.55 if you buy a reel of 5,000. So unfortunately it doesn't look like this will be able to compete with the ESP offerings for any sort of volume product.
- qwerty456127 4y agoI'm bored of Raspberry releasing endless minuscule and weak boards. I want a Raspberry Pi 5, like Pi 4 but with much more powerful CPU (so YouTube wouldn't be so slow - now the video plays OK but the UI is a pain) and IO (so I would be able to bit a multi-gigabit router+firewall+vpn on it). Nevertheless, whatever they do is awesome anyway.
- RL_Quine 4y agoIt sounds like you don't want a raspberry pi?
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYeah, I find I am the opposite in that I don't want the Pi 4, think the Pi 3 is sort of the sweet spot for performance/price. Pi Zero's have such wonky connectors....
- qwerty456127 4y agoPerhaps. I want something 100% compatible to Raspberry Pi (so it would support "hats" designed for the original Raspberry PI and also sun the original Raspberry PI OS, not the x86 clone) but way more powerful (for the reasons I mentioned - browsing the "modern" websites like YouTube without tears + networking). And no, mini-ITX won't fit in the place I need to put it.
- djhworld 4y agoI wouldn't bank on a 5th edition Pi any time soon. The supply chain issues for the pi4 have meant stock shortages for months on end and it probably won't let up. I'm guessing the Pico is a much simpler thing to make and in high quantities, so much easier to churn out to meet the demand
- moffkalast 4y agoYay, another useless 3.3 V microcontroller that needs a level shifter to do basically anything.
- Multicomp 4y agoIBM PC for $4,000ish: Intel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz with 256 KB of motherboard memory on some models Raspberry Pi Pico W for $5ish: two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores @ 133MHz with 264kB of on-chip SRAM Nearly 25 times the computing power (per core! So really 50 something times the computing power total) for 800 times less the price. Absolutely staggering how much our computing hardware capabilities have progressed! (And how we waste said hardware with our bloated proglangs. Anyone have book recommendations for RTL design patterns, design thinking?)
- ghaff 4y ago>And how we waste said hardware with our bloated proglangs. In fairness, the BASIC interpreter on the IBM PC was no paragon of efficiency either. And Microsoft's C compiler was something like $600. (In 1981 money when I was earning around $27K as an engineer.)
- svantana 4y agoI mean, if you're just looking at compute-per-dollar then this is a rather bland entry. The Pi Zero came out in 2015 for $5 and has >1000x the memory, is much faster and is a real computer that runs linux and even multiplies floats. Even among MCUs this one is not that great, you can find STM32-based boards ("blue/black pill") for <$3.
- user_7832 4y agoHow do the stm mcus compare to the teensy? I think the latest teensy is much faster than prevision versions, hitting 600mhz.
- svantana 4y agoYes, teensy 4.x is much faster, probably about 10x, but is also ~10x more expensive.
- magicalhippo 4y agoThe Teensy 4.x are based on a Cortex-M7 chip[1] from NXP. The STM32H7 line is also based on a Cortex-M7, though officially only up to 550MHz. I haven't studied the capabilities much, the biggest difference I could see was that the 550MHz version of the H7 only comes with 0.5MB SRAM vs 1MB SRAM for NXP one, while the H7 with 1MB SRAM only goes to 480MHz. However the STM32 parts comes with flash memory included (up to 2MB), while the NXP one has none. To me it seems the STM32H730VB[2] is one of the closer matches if you favor speed, while the STM32750VB[3] if you favor SRAM, but it depends heavily on the metric used for comparison. [1]: https://www.nxp.com/part/MIMXRT1062DVL6A#/ https://www.nxp.com/part/MIMXRT1062DVL6A#/ [2]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32h730vb.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32... [3]: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32h750vb.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- matt_trentini 4y agoActually, the MicroPython build for the Raspberry Pi Pico W has already been integrated into the CI pipeline: https://micropython.org/download/rp2-pico-w/ https://micropython.org/download/rp2-pico-w/
- jokoon 4y ago264kB of RAM? so you can't run linux on this, I guess?
- guenthert 4y agoIt's not meant to, but the Pico board comes with 8MiB of flash, so it is at least conceivable, even if not sensible, that someone gets Linux to run there (with a healthy dose of execute-in-place trickery). But why? It (well, the Pico board at least) already runs Python ;^)
- throwaway81523 4y agoThe Pico comes with 2MB of flash rather than 8MB, but same idea, more or less. There are some 3rd party boards with 8MB. I suppose you could connect up an SD card via SPI for near-unlimited storage. This might be of interest: https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/03/10/linux-written-in-python-for-the-raspberry-pi-pico-circuitpython-linux-python-bill88t/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/03/10/linux-written-in-python... It's a clickbait title, it's actually more of a busybox-like thing giving a linux-like shell from what I can tell. I haven't looked into it. FUZIX, which I think is based on Doug Braun's even earlier UZI (Unix Z80 Implementation), might also be of interest: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-to-get-started-with-fuzix-on-raspberry-pi-pico/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-to-get-started-with-fuz...
- _Microft 4y agoIt's a microcontroller, not a single-board computer.
- skybrian 4y agoYes, this is for embedded devices like Arduino. You write firmware and load it into flash. 264K is plenty for many things you can do with that kind of device.
- moffkalast 4y agoA bit low for Wifi stuff though isn't it? The ESP32 has 520KB and that's usually already somewhat limiting.
- efitz 4y agoWhy isn’t Bluetooth enabled? Bluetooth gives you a lot more flexibility in consumer provisioning of IoT devices (eg HomeKit, etc). The whole thing xperience od unpaired devices broadcasting as a WiFi AP and having to join your phone to that SSID is clunky.
- karmicthreat 4y agoI'm going to avoid RPI products where I can for right now. All the issues with availability have turned me off on them. Their attempts to get compute modules to businesses using them for products seems to have failed (or at least I have heard nothing from them). And this part in particular seems under specced compared to the competition.
- rcarmo 4y agoSo you’re dissing a new product because their former products aren’t readily available? That makes no sense.
- karmicthreat 4y agoIt has more to do with the RPI people not communicating about their supply issues effectively and not being effective in working with customers to plan for them. While that doesn't currently affect the Pico, maybe it will in the future. So its probably just better to sidestep the whole thing and not use their products.
- hattmall 4y agoWhat product do you recommend at a similar price point?
- karmicthreat 4y agoESP32 products.
- moffkalast 4y agoWhat's interesting with the ESP32 is that the Wifi stack on it consumes a huge amount of both memory and CPU... and it's faster and has more memory than the Pi Pico. So either they managed to make that more efficient somehow or you'll have exactly jack shit left after turning on wifi on it. Still, the ESP32 is not exactly cheap, but I have a feeling this $7 cost is the usual fantasy they advertise, then sell them for twice the price everywhere.
- prabhu-yu 4y agoPico does not have flash Protection/Lock. This makes impossible to protect the firmware. Almost every other uC has a feature to disable reading of flash content. Any comments on this?
- yellowapple 4y agoHow would you go about reading the flash (aside from doing so directly via QSPI)? The BOOTSEL mode is write-only from what I understand (and have observed).
- tverbeure 4y agoYou could always break into a program with the debugger (using the SWD interface), and load a program that reads data from the QSPI flash and dumps it to, say, a UART.
- prabhu-yu 4y ago(I may be wrong here.) Using Thonny IDE, I can just read all Python scripts stored in QSPI Flash. At least, I could not find how BOOTSEL will help here. QSPI Flash is external to RP2040. I was expecting some form of facility to encrypt XIP flash content and RP2040 could decrypt and execute (instead of execute only) Or, Any idea if Rpi would add this feature?
- hajimuz 4y agoAgain you can’t buy it with $6 anywhere.
- moffkalast 4y agoSure you can, from the Pi Hut... where it's gonna be sold out in 24 hours and never go on sale again.
- nsteel 4y agoRight so far with sold out at pihut! Except still stock at https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-w?variant=40059369619539 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-w?varia...
- bmicraft 4y agoJust bought it at my local pi reseller for exactly 7.2€ or 6 before vat
- andrewcamel 4y agoIt’s challenging to actually buy a Raspberry Pi these days unfortunately. All the official resellers are out of stock of all the other models and resellers have these on eBay for 3-4x the list price. Maybe this one will be in stock for longer…
- pstadler 4y agoWhile a WiFi enabled Pico is incredible, I don't understand why they're still using Micro USB over USB-C in 2022. Is there any good reason for choosing one over the other?
- rcarmo 4y agoI have a bunch of smaller, nicer Pico clones with USB-C ports. I expect the W to be cloned by Chinese manufacturers within the month.
- avel 4y agoCost perhaps.
- mmoskal 4y agoProbably under $0.05 difference - but when trying to hit $4 retail every cent matters.
- avian 4y agoA quick search on the supplier page I happen to have open right now puts the cheapest Micro B connector in stock at around $0.20 and the cheapest C at around $0.40 (both at factory MoQ). So the price difference still appears to be around x2. A few years ago when I was working on a project, the factor was in low two digits. It was a no-brainer to choose micro B over C.
- mmoskal 4y agoWell, LCSC [0] has microB at around $0.02 [1] and USB-C (16 pin) at $0.05 [2] [0] https://lcsc.com/products/USB-Connectors_369.html https://lcsc.com/products/USB-Connectors_369.html [1] https://lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-Connectors_XKB-Connectivity-U254-051T-4BH83-F1S_C397452.html https://lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-Connectors_XKB-Connectiv... [2] https://lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-Connectors_G-Switch-GT-USB-7010ASV_C2988369.html https://lcsc.com/product-detail/USB-Connectors_G-Switch-GT-U...
- synergy20 4y agostill out of stock to me when I click the place-your-order button at all those eshops.
- synergy20 4y agofound stocking at pishop.us and bought one, the device costs $6 but the shipping is $9
- kumarvvr 4y agoThis is awesome. The PICO has great software documentation and seems easy to program. I did not use it till now as it had no networking features at all. Now this comes along, and the Pico can form a great Edge device.
- joelthelion 4y agoWhat does power consumption look like? Is this useable for battery-powered applications?
- yellowapple 4y agoI haven't done any measurements, but the non-W variety seems to last a pretty long time on a battery, even while powering a DAC and speaker at max gain.
- synergy20 4y agoHow does this comparing to the ESP8266 families which is even cheaper, P2040 is taking the IoT space by storm.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elasticventures 4y agoRPI Pico is irrelevant in my view. Seriously checkout RISC-V equivalence (there are many, I like the ESP32-C3) Linux on RISC-V is real, china is using & standardizing on it. Ditch arm, skip RPI, ignore STM-32, and scoff at TI, .. RISC-V is the future. While you're at it - skip micropython, skip the OS Linux - use RUST and target RISC-V directly. The cost of RISC-V is cheap and will only continue to plummet, nothing in the IOT space is going to compete with RISC-V except absurdly expensive niche proprietary solutions that were engineered before the blackhole-esque super-nova gravity hole that is RISC-V which is happening right now in the IOT space. I'm not even sure those will survive, .. The RISC-V options are only going to continue to increase. I say this because China is using RISC-V for most of it's future everything, it's basically the national chip and there are literally tens of thousands of developers & engineers coming out of school into this ecosystem every single day. Do not use micropython, avoid all these runtime debugging headaches. Yeah, it might take you a few months or even years to learn RUST, but the concurrency, the power saving, the deterministic behaviors - oh joy! The headaches you will save, the extra rest at night and reduced stress will increase your lifespan. Qemu RISC-V for emulation + testing and you'll save yourself a ton of time only deploying and supporting code that works. Full simulated environments, you can test in parallel in the cloud, few platforms can do that! RISC-V + RUST it's a joy. Fewer crashes in the field-- and let me tell ya! .. when you're doing anything IOT that is the only thing that matters - never having a crash in the field, that's better than chocolate cake.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joezydeco 4y agoDitch arm, skip RPI, ignore STM-32, and scoff at TI, .. RISC-V is the future. Can you point to any parts that are in full production and have a 5-7 year supply horizon?
- NowhereMan 4y agoSince I like to build custom electronics using JLCPCB, I went on there and looked for RISC-V chips. I found the ESP32-C3 and a dozen or so Chinese chips that seemed to only have Chinese datasheets. It seems that things are still pretty immature in RISC-V adoption. I will be getting a ESP32-C3 dev board to tinker with at least.
- FloatArtifact 4y agoI'm curious of product support thread eg https://openthread.io/ https://openthread.io/ and matter. As a further thought raspberry pi Pico w with thread might interfere with Wi-Fi networks. Consumer routers aren't built to handle large amounts of the Wi-Fi clients and IoT.
- ac29 4y agoWhy do you think it would interfere with WiFi? IoT devices are pretty widespread these days, and use minimal data. A single Youtube stream is going to use substantially more airtime than dozens of IoT devices.
- rmbyrro 4y ago> We always believed that RP2040 was a great fit for commercial and industrial applications I always believed the Raspberries, Arduinos, etc weren't suitable for large-scale industrial applications. Do they really use Raspberry Pis in commercial/industrial products? Please forgive my ignorance, I have zero experience in the embedded systems industry.
- adolph 4y agoYes. That is why they thinned things down with the compute module form factors. https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/ https://jfrog.com/connect/post/3-best-industrial-raspberry-pi-solutions-in-2020/ https://jfrog.com/connect/post/3-best-industrial-raspberry-p...
- MarcScott 4y agoCommercial and Industrial applications are one of the reasons they're so difficult to get your hands on at the moment - https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoYes. I've seen at least one large HVAC controller (think the massive metal boxes on top of buildings) that ran on an RPi Compute module.
- dom96 4y ago> Like all modern Raspberry Pi boards, the radio circuitry is encapsulated in a metal shield can, reducing compliance costs for customers who want to integrate it into their own products. Does anyone familiar with CE/FTC compliance know how much easier this makes things? I have a project that uses an ESP32 and the lack of clarity around the infamous "CE+CE != CE" is rather annoying. I'm guessing the RPi is the same (i.e. if I put it in a case and want to sell it I still need to get testing done).
- sbf501 4y agoThe penalty for using linux & micropython in an embedded platform is enormous: power and performance with both will be inferior to a baremetal or RToS solution and C. As an embedded developer, you are far better off learning how to use the BSPs for the major embedded semi vendors, such as NXP, STMicro, and Renesas. No one is going to ship a battery powered IoT product that runs linux (and make money).
- tverbeure 4y agoMicroPython is totally fine for initial prototyping or for slow embedded control. Here's a good example of a project of mine where I used MicroPython: https://twitter.com/tom_verbeure/status/1536127568931217408 https://twitter.com/tom_verbeure/status/1536127568931217408. I needed a way to quickly drive a bunch LEDs but I didn't want to dive into C yet. Too about 20min to install MicroPython on the RP2040 (no clue why you're bringing up Linux) and get my LEDs going. Perfect! In a later phase, I'll convert to C, once MicroPython runs out of steam. For a lot of slow control projects, that will never be necessary.
- yellowapple 4y agoThe Pico doesn't run Linux. It does optionally run MicroPython or CircuitPython (I recently used the latter w/ a Pico for a friend's cosplay blaster pistol), but the C/C++ SDK is baremetal.
- alexklarjr 4y agoif you can’t find it, there are Chinese “black pill” board with same or more amount of ram and optional flash storage.
- peter_d_sherman 4y ago>"Raspberry Pi Pico W is priced at $6, and brings 802.11n wireless networking to the Pico platform, while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling." A super-cheap WiFi Router -- could be made out of this...
- rasz 4y agoCheaper than $1? https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater
- peter_d_sherman 4y agoExcellent link! Here you've got the idea of using a ESP8266 or ESP8285 microcontroller (basically a chip, an ASIC -- which contains CPU, enough onboard scratch RAM, WiFi circuitry, and GPIO -- to be used for the Ethernet interface, apparently implemented by a separate ASIC and/or attached module/electronic circuit) -- to implment a WiFi Router and/or Access Point... And for very little money no less! If we look at this set of ideas in the broadest most abstract way possible, we have an ASIC (in this case a Microcontroller) -- or set of ASICs (if we count the Ethernet chip as separate) which cost very little money to implement a WiFi Router/Access Point -- on... This leads me to the following question: What is the cheapest, absolute cheapest ASIC that is available today that would implement all of the features necessary to create a WiFi Router/Access Point -- with direct support for (one or possibly several) wired Ethernet ports -- included? And maybe another question: Would that thing be an ASIC, or would it be a board + Ethernet Ports based on that ASIC? (It may cost someone more money to purchase the additional components once you have that ASIC than the cost of purchasing a pre-manufactured board with all of them on it...) Let's suppose that the use case would be: You want to sell hardware devices with basic Router/Access-Point capabilities to customers, but you want to pay as little as you can for the parts... So what combination of those parts -- gets you the cheapest, yet most fully-functional WiFi Router/Access Point? Someone going down this path might need to even take into consideration costs arising from cases and power supplies -- because that's what end-users/consumers would expect as part of their purchase... Anyway, Excellent link!