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Gross, the dev board uses micro-USB. It's 2024! Otherwise amazing work. Exactly what's needed to compete with the existing giants.
by nimish 2y ago
Gross, the dev board uses micro-USB. It's 2024! Otherwise amazing work. Exactly what's needed to compete with the existing giants.
- sowbug 2y agoPerhaps the unfortunate choice of micro USB is to discourage real consumer products from being built with the dev board.
- user_7832 2y agoI wonder if it is more about simply shaving a few cents off. Full USB-C protocol implementation may be much more difficult.
- hypercube33 2y agoUSB-C doesn't require anything special USB wise as it's decoupled from the versioned standard. It just has more pins and works with all modern cables. Ideally the cables won't wear out like Mini and Micro and get loosey goosey in the ports.
- ewoodrich 2y agoYep, a USB-C connector is more or less a drop in replacement for MicroUSB if you don’t need USB3 or USB-PD. With one aggravating exception: it requires adding two 5.1kΩ pulldown resistors to be compatible with C-C cables. Thus signaling to a charger that the sink is a legacy non-PD device requesting 5V. Which is apparently an impossible ask for manufacturers of dev boards or cheap devices in general. It’s slightly more understandable for a tried and true dev board that’s just been connector swapped to USB-C (and I’ll happily take it over dealing with Micro) but inexcusable for a new design. My hope is Apple going USB-C only on all their charging bricks and now even C-C cables for the iPhone will eventually force Chinese OEMs to build standard compliant designs. Or deal with a 50% Amazon return rate for “broken no power won’t charge”.
- Brusco_RF 2y agoAs someone who just picked micro USB over USBC for a development card, there is a significant price and footprint size difference between the two.
- Findecanor 2y agoFor a device, USB-C requires two resistors that older USB ports don't. Declaring yourself as a host/device is also a bit different: USB-C hardware can switch. Micro USB has a "On-the-go" (OTG) indicator pin to indicate host/device. The USB PHY in RP2040 and the RP2350 is actually capable of being a USB host but the Micro USB port's OTG pin is not connected to anything.
- rvense 2y agoHm, I've used mine as a USB host with an adapter? Not sure of the details, I suppose OTG is the online/runtime switching and I was just running as fixed host?
- Findecanor 2y agoFor the microcontroller however, the use in commercial products is encouraged. There are one-time programmable registers for Vendor, Product, Device and Language IDs that the bootloader would use instead of the default. It would be interesting to see if those are fused on the Pico 2.
- Teknoman117 2y agoI would assume it's in order to maintain mechanical compatibility with the previous Pico.
- janice1999 2y agoIt saves cost and none of the features of USB-C (speed, power delivery etc) are supported. Makes sense.
- str3wer 2y agothe price difference from usb to usb-c is less than 2 cents
- refulgentis 2y agoYou would be surprised at the amount of effort and success $0.01 represents at BigCo. Even when projected sales are in 6 figure range.
- rldjbpin 2y agodevil's advocate: cables for an average user is a different story. also not to forget the vast range of cables already existing out there. also "proper" usb-c support is another can of worms, and maybe sticking to an older standard gives you freedom from all that.
- g15jv2dp 2y agoYou're confusing USB C and USB 3.1+. USB C is just the physical spec. You can design a cheap device that will only support USB 2 if you just connect ground, Vbus, D+ and D- and gasp add two resistors. It will work just as well as the micro-usb plug.
- rldjbpin 2y agocompletely valid, but i would like to think the org is still designing for accessibility for newbies in mind. like you said, the connector does not have to follow the standards. i have seen hdmi ports being used to carry pcie signal (not a good like but here is one such device https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_adapter/pce164p-no6-ver-008s-riser.html https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_adapter/pce164p-no6-ver...) amgon other things. it is still non-standard behaviour.
- hoherd 2y agoFWIW the Pimoroni Tiny 2040 and Tiny 2350 use usb-c, but as mentioned by other commenters, the cost for these usb-c boards is higher. I love having usb-c on all my modern products, but with so many micro-usb cords sitting around, I don't mind that the official Pico and Pico 2 are micro-usb. At least there are options for whichever port you prefer for the project you're using it in.
- magicalhippo 2y agoThe Pico 2 Plus[1] has USB-C, and seems quite reasonably priced to me given you get 16MB of Flash and 8MB PSRAM. [1]: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-plus-2 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-plus-2
- nine_k 2y agoUSB-C is way more complicated, even if you're not trying to push 4K video or 100W power through it. The interface chip ought to be more complex, and thus likely more expensive. You can still find a number of cheap gadgets with micro-USB on Aliexpress. Likely there's some demand, so yes, you can build a consumer product directly on the dev board, depending on your customer base.
- nimish 2y agoChinese boards are both cheaper and have usb type c implemented correctly and in spec, so that's no real excuse for raspberry pi
- 15155 2y agoHow are they "way more complicated?" You have to add two resistors and short another pair of DP/DM lines?
- nine_k 2y agoYes, indeed, I've checked, and apparently you don't need anything beyond this if you don't want super speed or power delivery (past 5V 3A). I did not realize how many pins in a USB-C socket are duplicated to make this possible. (For advanced features, you apparently still need to consider the orientation of the inserted cable.)
- Ductapemaster 2y agoYou can use a USB C connector with standard USB, no interface chip required. It's simply a connector form-factor change.