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Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our new $5 microcontroller board, on sale now
- fsagx 2y ago"Pre order - ships in late August"
- MuffinFlavored 2y agoHow many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this? The amount of different variations of Raspberry Pi's I've been collecting over the years for no good reason, all doing nothing. And I don't even consider myself part of the upper echelon/extremists when it comes to this. With that said, I wonder when we will get Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (with wireless/Bluetooth capabilites) > The unique dual-core, dual-architecture capability of RP2350 provides a pair of industry-standard Arm Cortex-M33 cores, and a pair of open-hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores, selectable in software or by programming the on-chip OTP memory. Kind of interesting... Two architectures in one chip? https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/
- throwuxiytayq 2y agoIf you don’t have a car you can probably waste a couple thousands of these without feeling too bad about it.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoThe plastic waste you produce in a day is way worse than a few PCBs you never use. Don't worry about it.
- katzinsky 2y agoSemiconductor fabrication is nasty. It's way worse than most plastic production. Even the board substrate itself is probably the most toxic kind of plastic out there (other than maybe styrene feed stock) before its cured and being a composite it decomposes the slowest. It's much much worse than most household waste. There are bigger things that produce way more waste though. Lots of vehicles (especially boats) have huge fiberglass composite components for example.
- ta988 2y agodisposable ecigs...
- katzinsky 2y ago[flagged]
- paulcole 2y ago> How many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this? Literally everyone in the developed world is guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint. If you already have any kids at all (for example), there's nothing you can do to reduce your damage to the earth. Go ahead and as many raspberry pis as will fit in your junk drawer and don't give it a second thought. If you ever get on a plane for vacation, same story. Raspberry Pi is a rounding error. If you buy a new phone every few years, again same story.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> If you already have any kids at all (for example), there's nothing you can do to reduce your damage to the earth This is a misanthropic perspective, we should have no kids and die out to reduce ‘damage to the earth’. Best environmentalist is a mass murderer. Worst climate criminal is a sperm donor. But if you look at the physical world, Earth already had 6 mass extinction events, asteroids, supervolcanoes, etc. they killed basically everything, and life bounces back. There will be more. Our efforts are unimpressive in comparison. In absolute, it doesn’t matter. From a humanist view, ‘Damage to the earth’ is damage to its ability to support human life. That’s the perspective that makes sense to me. One of the requirements is that civilisation continues. And the best contribution is to bring up a well adjusted, kind and capable individual, and for them to do the same. If lump together environmental impact of children and parents, then if your bloodline continues forever your evrironmental impact is infinite. This creative accounting leads to absurd conclusions
- bigstrat2003 2y agoHe didn't say that one shouldn't have kids due to environmental impact, he was just putting it in perspective. The point was that if you have kids, and if you don't worry about the environmental impact they cause, then you shouldn't worry about the much smaller impact of a Raspberry Pi either.
- paulcole 2y agoThat's not what I said at all! I said if you have kids don't hand wring over your environmental impact. It's like thinking that if you cry at the beach you're making the ocean saltier. If you have kids you're betting that, "the best contribution is to bring up a well adjusted, kind and capable individual, and for them to do the same." It's a decent bet for sure.
- ortusdux 2y agoDonate the dusty ones to the nearest hacker/makerspace?
- p51-remorse 2y agoLet’s do some math to see if this qualifies as something to worry about. They say they’ve sold 4 million Picos. The packaging can get recycled, but let’s just assume every single Pico ends up in a landfill. How big a problem is that? Datasheets say they’re 21x51mm. Looks like they’re on the order of 5mm deep. So 5.35mL per Pico. Four million of these would be 5659 gallons of Picos, 756 cubic feet. So you could take the e-waste of every Pico sold to date, and put it in a single 9.1ft cube in your garage. I’d argue that this doesn’t qualify as something we shouldn’t spend time worrying about. There’s probably at least one Pico, maybe running a sign at some EPA office, doing more good for the environment than all the waste from all of them together is causing harm.
- arrosenberg 2y agoThe packaging and production waste is probably the bigger issue considering the efficacy of recycling and the knowledge that all the waste of production winds up in the Pacific ocean.
- p51-remorse 2y agoSounds like effort is best spent on improving those processes, then, rather than worrying about personal consumption that doesn’t move the needle.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoYes and no. On the one hand, fixing those processes is a much bigger impact, you're 100% correct. But on the other hand, I as an individual can do exactly nothing to affect it. While my personal environmental impact is much smaller, I actually can control it. So both are valuable to think about in different ways.
- arrosenberg 2y agoOr do both? No one is telling you not to buy something you will use, but the OP was commenting about boards they purchased and never or rarely used. Being slightly more considerate about your use is free, and if more people do it, maybe it will move the needle a point or two.
- II2II 2y agoAs tempting as a new toy may be, we are always welcome to put off getting new ones until we have made good use of the old ones. That is especially true of microcontrollers and development boards, where the need to upgrade is dictated by the needs of the project. This isn't like a computer or mobile device where anything from updates to end-user applications or the operating system will artificially obsolete them.
- ssl-3 2y agoIt isn't necessary to hoard parts that just sit around and do nothing. It is possible to sell or give them to others who do have a use for them.
- squarefoot 2y ago> How many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this? Did you consider used market? I was stupid enough to not take the opportunity to make some good money when even ancient ones were unobtanium and overpriced everywhere, but recently managed to sell all my older ones at a decent price, so no direct waste was produced. What concerns me more about this Pico however is the signed boot locking feature that if not reversible could lock a Pico to the original program forever, so an used one couldn't be repurposed for anything else even if a non malicious user wanted to reflash it entirely without reading the original content. I'm not sure about that so I'd welcome more information on the subject: could signed boot locking be reversed with a complete flash erase?
- boristsr 2y agoThe used market is really good now from a buyers perspective. I'm working on a few projects and wanted a few extra pi's. Managed to grab a few used ones from people that have sidelined their projects. Good condition. Basically paid retail price but also got 7inch touch screens with each pi for free.
- thrtythreeforty 2y agoWow, this seems to address every complaint about the RP2040 I had. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom for the "One more thing" section. You can choose Cortex-M33 or RISC-V at boot time transparently!
- sand500 2y agoFor a mass produced product, why waste die space on RISC-V cores that can only be used instead of the Cortex cores? Why not just use that die space for more ram or another ARM core? Doesn't it make sense to sell a variant that is entirely RISC-V?
- cjbgkagh 2y agoWild-ass guess; but I assume there is a lot of overlap in the functionality between the type of cores which would mean only a small amount of extra space is required for the additional RISC-V instruction set support as opposed to having distinct CPU cores.
- Y_Y 2y agoThey're sharing silicon? That's cool if true.
- coder543 2y agoI highly doubt it. I agree it would be cool if it were true.
- BertoldVdb 2y agoIt's very unlikely IMHO. Both the RISC-V and the M33 are very tiny in die area, compared to for example the 512kB RAM, or even compared to a few bond-pads. Making a single core with two instruction decoders but a shared register file, caches, prediction logic and ALU would make sense for a very high-end application processor type core, but not for these small devices. You would also need an instruction set license from ARM for that, vs just licensing the M33 netlist.
- mg 2y agoWhich Raspberry Pi would one need to run Vim and Firefox? And is it possible to have it use a tablet as a monitor and draw power from it? That would be everything I need to develop web applications. I wonder if I could use a 3-piece setup to do so: A keyboard connected to the Pi The Pi connected to a tablet which acts as a monitor Not sure how much the Pi weights, probably less than 100g? The Apple Magic Keyboard for example is 230g. And the Lenovo Tab P12 for example is 570g. So together less than 1kg. For a Linux development machine with external keyboard, that would be quite nice.
- thrtythreeforty 2y agoThis is... not going to run Firefox. The Pico is a microcontroller with 520KB of RAM.
- mnk47 2y agowhat can I build with this? 0 experience in embedded dev. I'd like to make something like the Game & Watch, or a toy synth.
- LNSY 2y agoMy dream is to have a device about the form factor of a Flipper Zero (with the same buttons) that I can then plug into a e-ink monitor and mechanical keyboard to turn it into a text editor. I have built a few prototypes with Raspberry Pi Zeros, which are luxurious web servers -- 512mb of ram, capable of utilizing a 2tb sd card.
- tekno45 2y agoIf you skip the plugable and mechanical keyboard parts you're basically describing a cyberdeck. https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/1eksn4a/3d_printed_pi_zero_cyberdeck_shell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/1eksn4a/3d_print...
- ranger207 2y agoAny of the non-Pico Pis could do that although the highest performance would be one of the new Raspberry Pi 5 8GBs. The Pico series are not suitable for desktop computing
- pjot 2y agoYes, it can run DOOM. We’ve seen some amazing demonstrations of that power: from our very own Graham Sanderson’s port of DOOM
- 01100011 2y agoMaybe a good place to ask this: does anyone know of an all-in-one board for battery management in small mobile devices? Recently started playing with the ESP32 and was surprised there isn't a ready-to-go board on AliExpress for handling usb battery charging with simultaneous device powering. I want to add a LiPo to my design and have it just work like my cell phone does.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoAdafruit has a couple of LiPo charger boards, but they don't have the integration you'd want: you'd need a separate USB cable for charging. ISTR that some of their ESP32 boards do, though. i.e., charge LiPo through the USB port. Also, I think some of the Heltec boards do. I have one here with a JST battery connector, but I haven't used it in so long, I'm not sure. I think this is the one I have: https://heltec.org/project/wifi-kit32-v3/ https://heltec.org/project/wifi-kit32-v3/
- brk 2y agoLILYGO has some. I have one on my desk right now, the T18: https://github.com/LilyGO/TTGO-T-ControllerV2.2/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/LilyGO/TTGO-T-ControllerV2.2/blob/master/... Though I'll also not I'm having some problems getting it to take an upload properly, but I tend to find most of the LILYGO stuff takes a little experimentation to get everything right, then it is reliable once you know what it likes.
- heywire 2y agoThe Heltec Lora32 has integrated LiPo circuitry, but it might be overkill if you don’t need the RF side of things.
- numpad0 2y agoESP32 chips supposedly has an integrated BMS, and it's used in M5Stack as well as Seeeduino XIAO. Weird part is it's not clearly stated how it works other than you're supposed to solder a battery on.
- jonp888 2y agoPimoroni has a range of products. Here is a generic batter management board with simultaneous charging: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/lipo-amigo?variant=39779302539347 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/lipo-amigo?variant=397793... You can also get version to fit the Pico, or even a RP2040 based board with integrated battery management.
- lostemptations5 2y agoI don't really get it. It's not even competitive with an ESP32 -- it has no communications at all.
- noodlesUK 2y agoLots of applications don’t require radios, but the previous series of RP2040s had a “W” variant that had wifi and BLE. We may yet see a RP2350W.
- freeqaz 2y agoThey say in the post that it will be released towards the end of the year.
- tpmoney 2y agoTheir plan is to have it by the end of the year: >Before the end of the year, we expect to ship a wireless-enabled Pico 2 W, using the same Infineon 43439 modem as Pico W, and versions of both Pico 2 and Pico 2 W with pre-installed 0.1-inch headers.
- jonp888 2y agoYou are mixing up SOCs and devboards. RP2040 is a chip, there has never been version with onboard communication. Raspberry Pi Foundation released a RP2040 based dev board(Pico W) with an additional external wireless chip, as have others(including boards with an additional ESP32 just do comms).
- noodlesUK 2y agoAh thanks for clearing that up. Entirely my mistake, I thought that it was a package like the ESP32, but it is not.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoLot applications out there that don't need that but need plenty of RAM & Flash to run an 800x480 TFT graphics display.
- latsu 2y agoWhy oh why is still using Micro USB?! I was hoping that the next iteration would start using USB-C even if it costed a bit more per-board.
- jsheard 2y agoTheir partners already have tons of alternative boards ready to go, including a few which are drop-in replacements for the Pico, if you don't mind spending a bit more for USB-C: https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/powered-by/product-catalogue/?category=RP2350 https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/powered-by/product-...
- latsu 2y agoThe problem is most of the boards from partners are specialized with different hardware add-ons and have a significant markup at about 10 USD a board, which makes it harder to justify buying a handful of boards to tinker with. It's quite unfortunate.
- jsheard 2y agoThat's true, but give it a few weeks and AliExpress will be full of dirt cheap Pico/ProMicro-compatible RP2350 boards with USB-C. I recently bought a dozen RP2040 ProMicros with USB-C and 16MB flash for about $2.70 each, and there's variants with smaller flash for even less. This store, if you're wondering: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006130019224.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006130019224.html
- stiltzkin 2y agoAre this almost identical to the rpi so I can install rpi OS?
- pdpi 2y agoNo, these are microcontrollers. They're the thing you'd put inside a device that needs a tiny bit of smarts, like Raspberry Pi's debug probe[0]. The case I have for my RPi5[1] uses an rp2040 to run the thermal management logic. 0. https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/debug-probe.html https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/d... 1. https://argon40.com/en-gb/products/argon-one-v3-m-2-nvme-case https://argon40.com/en-gb/products/argon-one-v3-m-2-nvme-cas...
- camel-cdr 2y agoOh, cool two Cortex-M33 cores (4.09 CoreMark/MHz) and two open-source RISC-V Hazard3 cores (3.81 CoreMark/MHz): https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3 https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3
- jaustin 2y agoLooks like it's an "and" in silicon and an "or" at boot time? >RP2350 includes a pair of open-hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores which can be substituted at boot time for the Cortex-M33 cores. Our boot ROM can even auto-detect the architecture for which a second-stage binary has been built and reboot the chip into the appropriate mode https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/silicon.html#architecture-switching https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/s...
- Narishma 2y agoFrom what I've read, it's also possible to run one ARM core and one RISC-V core concurrently.
- tommiegannert 2y agoYes, the ARCHSEL register has one bit for each core. Page 1274 of https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p....
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoBut how would that be practically usable?
- gigel82 2y agoI honestly would've expected WiFi on-chip. There are fewer and fewer use cases without connectivity, and it's so wasteful to have a separate chip for that.
- zamadatix 2y agoThe W versions of the Pico mentioned towards the end target that use case. It's usually a couple dollars more (which is a lot at this price point).
- bmicraft 2y agoThat's a whole board with yet another chip, not a single chip with wireless capability
- guax 2y agoThere are tons of use cases for microcontrollers without wifi. The pico chip can and is used as a auxiliary micro to other systems that have networking already. The pico w will come out later this year.
- BertoldVdb 2y agoThat functionality is absolutely non-trivial. There are a few WiFi cores (digital and RF) you can license but they are expensive and the analog part uses a lot of die area. If you look up die shots from the ESP chips, you see that the radio is more than half of the die. Espressif apparently has their own WiFi implementation, which makes sense as they are a major vendor of very cheap tablet and cell phone WiFi radios. This is likely why they can offer that feature so cheaply. Bluetooth Low Energy is way simpler BTW.
- 127 2y agoI'm praying and hoping they fixed the ADC.
- coder543 2y agoSounds like it is an approximately 9.5-bit ADC now, instead of 9-bit like the RP2040 was. So... not much change. Datasheet section 12.4.1 "Changes from RP2040" - Removed spikes in differential nonlinearity at codes 0x200, 0x600, 0xa00 and 0xe00, as documented by erratum RP2040-E11, improving the ADC’s precision by around 0.5 ENOB. - Increased the number of external ADC input channels from 4 to 8 channels, in the QFN-80 package only. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...
- hasheddan 2y agoLuke (author of Hazard3) provided some context regarding including the Hazard3 cores alongside the M33's: > I can't compare the sizes of the two cores. The final die size would likely have been exactly the same with the Hazard3 removed, as std cell logic is compressible, and there is some rounding on the die dimensions due to constraints on the pad ring design. I can say that we taped out at a very high std cell utilisation and we might have saved a few grey hairs during final layout and STA by deleting the RISC-V cores. https://x.com/wren6991/status/1821582405188350417 https://x.com/wren6991/status/1821582405188350417
- jchw 2y agoSo we've seen people discuss doing dirty tricks like trapping and emulating writes, among other horrible things, to get external RAM "working" on an RP2040. The RP2350 datasheet says it supports read/write memory mapping on its new QSPI memory interface. So, does that mean one can just straightforwardly hook up PSRAM? I'm not much of a hardware person but this seems very promising. (And also, I'm really curious how much better the performance will be if you can do that.)
- boojums 2y ago>Support for external QSPI PSRAM The post claims PSRAM is supported.
- jchw 2y agoOh I see. I either got merged into this discussion from another thread or came here from a dupe link, but I was looking at the product page which didn't seem to talk about it. Either way, that seems like great news.
- Klaus23 2y agoI'm a bit surprised by the RISC-V cores. I thought the ARM investment would kill any such aspirations. The investment was made nine months ago. Is a hardware design locked in at this point? We will see what happens in the future and whether we will get more RISC-V cores.
- polishdude20 2y agoWoah an on-chip switch mode power supply? How does that work? I've put together these before on a PCB and they require an inductor and a bunch of other supporting passive elements. How does all that fit onto a chip?
- welterde 2y agoIf I read the datasheet correctly you still need an inductor and some passive components externally. The only thing that is not needed is an external switch mode power supply chip.
- OnACoffeeBreak 2y agoThey probably mean "on-board" instead of "on-chip". Data sheet [0] section "5.4 Powerchain" shows an external RT6150 buck-boost switcher with an external inductor. 0: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/pico-2-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/pico-2-datasheet.pdf Edit: reading further in that section of the data sheet, "The RP2350 has an on-chip switching regulator that powers the digital core at 1.1V (nominal) from the 3.3V supply, which is not shown in Figure 7." It has proven difficult enough to find a PDF of the schematic (I don't have Cadence Allegro installed) that I am giving up.
- throwup238 2y agoThey don't. You still need those passive elements. See section 6.3 of the datasheet.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tommiegannert 2y agoCompared to RP2040: Larger package (60 or 80 pins) Variant with 2 MB in-package Flash Secure boot and encrypted boot Two security execution contexts Random number generator SHA-256 accelerator 8 kB of OTP ROM (separate from the 32 kB BOOTROM) 8 channel HSTX high speed serial transmitter 30->48 GPIO (18 more, in the 80 pins) 8->12 PIO state machines 12->16 DMA channels RISC-V and ARM (selectable at boot, individually per core) Cortex-M0+->Cortex-M33 (I don't know what that means in practice) 133->150 MHz core clock https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...
- Narishma 2y ago> Larger package (60 or 80 pins) I think the 60 pin version is the same size as RP2040.
- tommiegannert 2y agoIt's a QFN56, but yeah, basically the same.
- qwertox 2y agoOne of the nicest datasheets I've seen. Not in terms of the product specs (which are also really nice), but in terms of layout and content.
- disqard 2y agoThanks for calling that out! Indeed, that is a well-written technical book that one could read cover-to-cover. It has a clear progression of topics, and all of the text is beautifully written: "Once secure boot is enabled, the bootrom verifies signatures of images from all supported media: flash, OTP, and images preloaded into SRAM via the UART and USB bootloaders. At this point you lose the ability to run unsigned images; during development you may find it more convenient to leave secure boot disabled. The next section describes the generation of signed images to run on a secure-boot-enabled device." "The chip-level reset subsystem shares a register address space with other power management subsystems in the always-on domain. The address space is referred to as POWMAN elsewhere in this document. A complete list of POWMAN registers is provided in Section 6.4, “Power Management (POWMAN) Registers”, but information on registers associated with the brownout detector are repeated here." "The clocks block provides independent clocks to on-chip and external components. It takes inputs from a variety of clock sources, allowing the user to trade off performance against cost, board area and power consumption. From these sources it uses multiple clock generators to provide the required clocks. This architecture allows the user flexibility to start and stop clocks independently and to vary some clock frequencies whilst maintaining others at their optimum frequencies." I am thoroughly impressed!!
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoLots of nice steady improvements but 8 high speed outputs is a really nice benefit. > The maximum frequency for the HSTX clock is 150 MHz, the same as the system clock. With DDR output operation, this is a maximum data rate of 300 Mb/s per pin.
- cryptonector 2y agoThe secure boot option is very appealing. I could see using these to implement secure enclaves and cheap HSMs.