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A new RPI Pico in the works?

scottiebabe

Eben Upton Hints at an RP2040 Successor, Promises a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 in 2024

"We know what people don't like [and] what people do like," Upton says, "and we have a chip team."

I will call a spade a spade and say the sleep current of the RP2040 @ 1 mA is atrocious. I sincerely hope they improve the sleep current.

I think the QSPI memory controller could be improved as well.

Maybe more PIO memory...

But I don't have that many criticism about the pico.. 

Does the pico have any sore points for you?

  • overall, I'm a fan boy.

    I share the power consumption critique. It's not a surprise - they didn't aim for low power. But it's restrictive.
    Also the ADC: not that good.
    Other comments here that I acknowledge, but that don't bother me: Keil tool chain support, external flash need, atypical peripherals.

    What I like: the double core, the C library (and its build infrastructure). The examples for popular libraries (tinyusb, freertos). And the community support.
    As a learning tool for advanced microcontroller topics, it's one of the best I have.

  • To me, it is very clear the RP2040 was an MVP for their first microcontroller.

    There are a lot of great features: dual-core, interpolator, PIO (obviously my favorite), and the robust C SDK. That said, there is no encryption for an external flash, no internal flash, limited internal SRAM, terrible sleep modes, a QFN-only package, maxing out at USB FS, a less-than-stellar ADC, etc.

    I don't think it was ever intended to be incorporated into a volume end-product other than boards like the Pico, where the RP2040's feature set works very well.

    Overall, I'm a fan of the chip. I've got an upcoming project that uses it (well two of them) because of the PIO. And I've probably designed about a dozen boards around it now.

    Regarding the Pico: the lack of a reset button really, really irritates me.

    Also, I hate that the Pico doesn't have a reset button.

    So, along those lines, I think it'd be great if a new Pico came with a reset button.

  • in reply to cstanton

    It's a fair point. One would think we would hear about an IOT product using a pico-w 

    Like we hear about esp devices https://templates.blakadder.com/esp32.html 

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    The robotics club I lead has a Raspberry Pi Jam/Arduino Maker Open House at the nearby library every year in March. Excess unused inventory is used for door prizes and hourly drawings. When major league makers clean out their closets and donate their stuff to us, we have also advertised "swap meets" for people to pick up and exchange. The "swap meets" are really popular, even long buried engineers dig their way out of the graveyard to get free stuff   :-)     

  • SWO. Once you got bitten by SWD SWO is the next logical step. UART sometimes could not keep up, USB is needed for the function you are developing. 

  • in reply to robogary

    The swap neats sound like a great idea to circulate unused dev boards.