Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico

We are very excited to introduce the all new Raspberry Pi Pico, a tiny, $4, MicroPython and C/C++ board with custom RP2040 silicon.

This is the first product from the Raspberry Pi Foundation built with their in house designed RP2040.

At $4 and available individually or even available on reels, this Raspberry Pi is the next step in home and industrial products.

Looking at the edge of the PCB you can see the Raspberry Pi Pico has been designed to be used with header pins or soldered directly onto your products PCB.

James Adams, Chief Operating Officer, Raspberry Pi Trading, said:

“This is the start of an exciting new era for Raspberry Pi. With Raspberry Pi Pico, and RP2040, we have been able to draw on insights drawn from a decade of using other vendors’ microcontrollers, and to create an innovative silicon platform for our customers. People have used Raspberry Pi to create a broader spread of projects and products than we could have imagined a decade ago; we’re sure the same will be true of Raspberry Pi Pico.”

Raspberry Pi Pico Specifications:

GPIO and Debug Pins
RP2040 Microcontroller
Two cores clocked at 133MHz
256KB RAM
2MB of On-board Flash Memory
Micro-USB B Port for Power, Data and Reprogramming of the Flash memory.

Raspberry Pi Pico Peripherals:

I2C x4
SPI x2
PWM x2
UART x2
Timer
RTC
ADC & TS

Raspberry Pi Pico Dimensions:

21mm (W) x 51.3mm (L) x 3.9mm (H)

Raspberry Pi Pico GPIO Pinout

The 40 pin 21x51 'DIP' style 1mm thick PCB with 0.1" through-hole pins also with edge castellations

Exposes 26 multi-function 3.3V General Purpose I/O (GPIO)
23 GPIO are digital-only and 3 are ADC capable
Can be surface mounted as a module
3-pin ARM Serial Wire Debug (SWD) port

First Product built on Raspberry Pi designed Silicon - Meet the RP2040

Raspberry Pi Pico is built around the brand-new Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, delivering a flexible, highly affordable development platform that can also be directly deployed into end products, reducing time-to-market. RP2040 offers high performance for integer workloads, a large on-chip memory, and a wide range of I/O options, making it a flexible solution for a wide range of microcontroller applications.
Professional design engineers who are already comfortable working with Raspberry Pi will easily adopt the Raspberry Pi Pico and appreciate its ease of use and affordability.

RP2040 Microcontroller.
RP2040 is a low-cost, high-performance microcontroller device with flexible digital interfaces. Key features:

• Dual Cortex M0+ processors, up to 133 MHz

• 264 kB of embedded SRAM in 6 banks

• 30 multifunction GPIO

• 6 dedicated IO for SPI Flash (supporting XIP)

• Dedicated hardware for commonly used peripherals

• Programmable IO for extended peripheral support

• 4 channel ADC with internal temperature sensor, 0.5 MSa/s, 12 bit conversion

• USB 1.1 Host/Device

Developer tools
Simple drag and drop programming via micro-USB. 3-pin Serial Wire Debug (SWD) for interactive debugging. Comprehensive C SDK, mature MicroPython port, and extensive examples and documentation.

Power
On-board power supply to generate 3.3V for RP2040 and external circuitry. Wide input voltage range, from 1.8V to 5.5V, giving designers the flexibility to select their preferred power source.

Raspberry Pi Pico Size and Layout:

Top Comments

robogary over 3 years ago in reply to dougw

I'd expect at $4 a pop, the profit margin even at 50K units/week doesnt justifiy adding a production line for shipping higher volumes.
The next wizbang design a year or two down the road will obsolete this one anyway.
I dont where the RPi Pico is manufactured, but likely it competes with other more lucrative products for production line time.
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ralphjy over 3 years ago in reply to dougw

I’ve found that Newark is not a good indicator of availability of this type of item. Not sure why, but when I’m looking for small development boards and sensors, Newark seems always to be out of stock. In many cases I can find the items at other distributors like Digikey or Mouser. I got my Picos at Sparkfun.

That being said, there does seem to be a large demand for hobby/maker type electronics due to the pandemic. Lots of stuff is only available on back order. I'm still waiting for a drone frame kit from Farnell ordered last June .

The Pico is a pretty barebones configuration although it does break out a lot of IO. With all the other RP2040 board options becoming available, I would expect the demand for the Pico to slow down. Then maybe we'll see whether it is a chip or PCB/CCA issue. I've already got a few of the Sparkfun RP2040 boards.
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dougw over 3 years ago

It seems demand is currently outstripping production.
Speculation based on some second hand data - shipping around 50K per week with about a 16 week backlog of orders.
How long will demand exceed production capacity?
At what point would it make sense to increase capacity?
Is there a bottle neck with chip production or CCA assembly or both?
When is Newark likely to have stock?
Is this level of demand anticipated or a big surprise?
I doubt there are any definitive answers out there, but uncertainty makes it very hard to plan projects and products.
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wizio over 3 years ago

for Arduino IDE
https://github.com/Wiz-IO/wizio-arduino-pico
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neerajrd82 over 3 years ago in reply to neerajrd82

I sincerely think that people have not understood me correctly. I was not talking about the files to be generated by compiler. I was actually talking about *.hex & *.bin file support in raspberry pico board. I mean if I load/copy any of these two formats in similar fashion as *.elf file. If the board will respond to this correctly?
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cstanton over 3 years ago in reply to jomoenginer

It's like an echo...
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jomoenginer over 3 years ago in reply to neilk

It's like an echo.
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neilk over 3 years ago in reply to jomoenginer

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/getting-started-with-pico.pdf has been substantially revised since I last looked at it and used it to write my blogs - some editing is needed in my blogs!!

Section 8.3 Automating Project Creation has been added and the section relating to building on Windows has been renumbered to 9.2, with some changes.

Maybe this will resolve some issues

Neil
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Fred27 over 3 years ago in reply to jomoenginer

It's reasonably easy to adapt the template too. I used a picoprobe rather than a Pi for debugging and have a few different config settings, so modified it to turn out projects that suit me better.
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jomoenginer over 3 years ago

I noticed in the Getting started with Raspberry Pi Pico PDF, under section 8.3 Automating project creation, they list a pico-project-generator tool that provides a GUI to assist in creating a Visual Studio Code supported project and CMake files for the Pico.
It links to the following GitHub repo:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-project-generator

This might be helpful to some folks.
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