Raspberry Silicon: Raspberry Pi Pico now on sale at $4 | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Silicon: Raspberry Pi Pico now on sale at $4

raspberrypi.org

95 pointsMarcScott28 comments

The programmable IO peripherals on this part are awesome. They are 8 state machines that can toggle IO at "light speed" - the system clock rate - based on a small assembly program, with lots of hardware accelerated FIFOs and shifting.

The datasheet for the accelerators is pretty rich and well written with a ton of examples (an oddity for typically poorly-documented state machines - looking at you, i.MX DMA).

Someone had fun with it (and it also pretty clearly makes the point that these are not general purpose coprocessor accelerators):

> Although not designed for computation, PIO is quite likely Turing-complete, and it is conjectured that it could run DOOM, given a sufficiently high clock speed. [...] A full 32-bit addition takes only around one minute at 125 MHz.

> // Pop quiz: how many additions does the processor do when calling this function [to set up the PIO addition program]

Lol.

If the $5 pi zero was any indication, you won't be able to buy any of these unless in a $35 package with bunch of useless accessories

Not true: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico

Yeah, but give them a few days :)

We've made plenty, so supply shouldn't be an issue. Like the zero, we're giving it away for free on the front of a magazine as well. - https://hackspace.raspberrypi.org/issues/39

Could be but pico might not create the same demand either.

True maybe when it first came out but not so much nowadays. Authorized resellers still have the $5 price but the shipping is “steep”.

"With two fast cores and and a large amount of on-chip RAM, RP2040 is a great platform for machine learning applications."

I'm not so sure, 264KB of RAM is not great for machine learning.

With two fast cores and and a large amount of on-chip RAM, > RP2040 is a great platform for machine learning applications. You can find Pete Warden’s port of Google’s TensorFlow Lite framework here. Look out for more machine learning content over the coming months.

The proof will be in the pudding, right?

I guess they mean inference. Looking forward to seeing the use-cases.

It doesn't look like wifi or bluetooth is onboard. The ESP32 has similar I/O, RAM, and includes a wifi/bluetooth chip.

The companion arduino product released alongside this has WiFi/BLE [1].

Anyway, RPi as a brand carries a lot of weight. I can be sure this is a well-polished product that'll be both easy to learn and easy to go from prototype to final product. My experience with ESP had more rough edges. Maybe those have been paved over in the 5 years since I had a go at the ESP8266, but that's still an unknown to me, whereas if I go with the Pi I have no doubts.

[1] https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-t...

Pimoroni have already made a load of adding for it: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico

Do they have a distributor inside the EU? Customs processing for such orders in Germany is an absolute hassle.

The main rasp website has a tool for locating suppliers in a given country

The details aren't totally clear to me, but it seems (https://twitter.com/pimoroni/status/1161319177262706688) they opened Pimoroni GmbH as a German subsidiary just after the Brexit vote for exactly this reason, so maybe they have a warehouse on the continent somewhere?

Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25856291 - mod please consider joining these threads

If there is no schematic and you can't buy the chip alone e.g. on Mouser then that's a pass. You can't do anything serious otherwise and you get locked in. Better get something like stm32 or teensy.

While I agree you with you in principle, for once they really seem to have gone all out on being fully open, unlike in the past. Kudos.

From the linked blog post:

We hope to make RP2040 broadly available in the second quarter of 2021.

Schematics for a demo board/etc and a very detailed datasheet:

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/hardware_design_wi...

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.p...

Looks like I was wrong! That's a great news

Agreed. I guess that very neat programmable IO could be considered as something that would cause lock-in, but in this case, I think the lock-in factor is fair - they are delivering something reasonable unique.

Is there a way to run a node.js server on it?

Very unlikely, given that it has an ARMv6-M processor and 264KB RAM.

But I'm sure enthusiasts will port Espruino/JavaScript [0] into it some day. [0] https://www.espruino.com/

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but there does t seem to be any flash on the Pi Si board and you have to combine it with a motherboard to use it?

(I see an IC that looks like a serial flash in the picture, but not mention of it in the text)

Under the “Raspberry Pi Pico” subheading it says ”Raspberry Pi Pico is designed as our low-cost breakout board for RP2040. It pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash memory, and a power supply chip supporting input voltages from 1.8-5.5V.”

Yes, but what about Pi Si?

You're going to have to provide a link to whatever you're talking about. The Pi Pico is the only hardware product that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is releasing to the general public today. They have partners releasing other products based on the RP2040.

I think you're referring to the Pi Pico, but you think it's called something else. There is no product called "Pi Si", as far as I can find. The link that this HN post is pointing to is about the Pi Pico.

If you're just referring to the chip itself ("Raspberry Silicon", "RP2040"), all surface mount chips have to be used on a "motherboard" (PCB) of some kind, so the question seems irrelevant. Based on the datasheet, yes, the chip seems to have no internal flash, so you have to use an external flash chip, but even if it did have internal flash... you would still have to use the chip on a PCB, so it doesn't matter in regards to the original question.

This chip seems like your regular Arm Cortex M0 , like the SAMD 21. Is there something way different about this chip that makes it stand out?

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