High-Performance $4 Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontroller Board with Flexible Digital Interfaces

21 January 2021 - 0 Comments

Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, fast and versatile microcontroller board built using RP2040 and comes in a 7 × 7 mm QFN-56 package with just two square millimeters of 40nm silicon. High performance particularly for integer workloads, flexible I/O, and affordability are the key aspects that make this device worth buying. Raspberry Pi Pico pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash memory, and a power supply chip supporting input voltages from 1.8-5.5V. This enables users to power the Pico board from a wide variety of sources including two or three AA cells in series or a single lithium-ion cell.

This new microcontroller board provides a single push button to enter USB mass-storage mode at boot time and as a general input, and a single LED. It exposes 26 of the 30 GPIO pins on RP2040, including three of the four analogue inputs to 0.1”-pitch pads. Users can easily solder headers to these pads with the help of castellated edges. With six independent banks of RAM and a fully connected switch, you can easily arrange for the cores and DMA engines to run in parallel without contention.

Key features of Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontroller Board

RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the United Kingdom
Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of onboard Flash memory
Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards
USB 1.1 with device and host support
Low-power sleep and dormant modes
Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB
26 × multi-function GPIO pins
2 × SPI, 2 × I2C, 2 × UART, 3 × 12-bit ADC, 16 × controllable PWM channels
Accurate clock and timer on-chip
Temperature sensor
Accelerated floating-point libraries on-chip
8 × Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support

Priced at just $4, you can buy Raspberry Pi Pico online today from the approved resellers or local newsagent where you get free Pico with this month’s HackSpace magazine. Volume customers will be able to buy pre-reeled Pico units.

Note: More technical information can be found in the Raspberry Pi Pico Board datasheet linked at the bottom of this page and on the Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontroller Board product page.