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

wizio over 5 years ago in reply to wizio

48MHz ( -Os ) CoreMark 1.0 : 146.58
150MHz ( -Os ) CoreMark 1.0 : 293.19

example: https://github.com/Wiz-IO/wizio-pico/tree/main/examples/arduino/CoreMark
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wizio over 5 years ago

Hello,

I make PlatformIO platform for Pi Pico
Now support Baremetal (pico-sdk), Arduino soon...
Link: https://github.com/Wiz-IO/wizio-pico
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jomoenginer over 5 years ago

The Pico has been added as a supported board with the RT-Thread Studio IDE:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1810095
https://www.rt-thread.io/index.html
https://github.com/RT-Thread/rt-thread/tree/master/bsp/raspberry-pico

However, it still is not shown on the Supported Chips and Boards page as of yet:
https://www.rt-thread.io/board.html
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Jan Cumps over 5 years ago in reply to jomoenginer

I listened to it too. A great episode.
I'd classify it under microcontrollers for my peace of mind . They have (half) a point though.
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jomoenginer over 5 years ago

I just listened to the latest episode of the AmpHour where Dave and Chris did briefly discuss the Raspberry Pi Pico and seemed to view it as favorable. However, they did point out a Twitter post at TubeTimeUS where there was discussion of whether the RP2040 is truly a Microcontroller or really a Microprocessor since it lacks internal Flash memory. Apparently, in the next episode of the AmpHour, 2/7/2021(??), they will have folks from the Raspberry Pi Foundation on to discuss the Pico and get their input on how the RP2040 should be classified.

Ref:
https://theamphour.com/528-new-year-new-gear/

Pico discussion starts around 0:39:35 in.
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ralphjy over 5 years ago in reply to jomoenginer

No Microcenter near Oregon and it looks like most locations sold out quickly. I guess I'll have to get mine for $4 and shipping.
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jomoenginer over 5 years ago in reply to rozberry

Are you just plugging in the Pico to a Windows system?
You may know this already, but Windows 7 went end of support by Microsoft last year so I would suspect questions regarding this will lead to telling you to update to at least to Win10.

With regards to the Linux side, have you followed the Instructions in the Getting Started Guide for the Pico?
https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/getting-started-with-pico.pdf

Are you using a VM on Windows 7 or a PC or something else running Linux?
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rozberry over 5 years ago

Has anybody been able to install this on Win7? I get the message "RP2 Boot No Driver found." Also in Device Manager, no CDC driver is installed. Please do not tell me to get Win10 or 11 or whatever the current iteration is. I'm done with Windows.
Also tried it under Ubuntu. I was able to load the uPython uf2 file onto the board, but still Ubuntu does not show the device serial port when plugged in.
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jomoenginer over 5 years ago

For those who attempt to install the Pico tools and examples on a Raspberry Pi 4 via the 'pico_setup.sh' script, note you need to have at least GCC 8.3.0 installed otherwise the build will fail.

You can check this as such:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ gcc --version
gcc (Raspbian 8.3.0-6+rpi1) 8.3.0

If it is less than 8.3.0, then it needs to be upgraded. This does not seem to happen with a full-upgrade so you either have to burn the latest Raspberry Pi 4 image or run through a series of 'update-alternatives' commands as I had to.

This is outlined in the following link:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/26498/how-to-choose-the-default-gcc-and-g-version

This is what I did:

Before:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ gcc --version
gcc (Raspbian 5.5.0-8) 5.5.0 20171010
Copyright (C) 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOS

To fix it:

sudo update-alternatives --list gcc
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all gcc
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all g++

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gcc-8 gcc-8 g++-8 g++-8
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-5 10
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-8 20
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-5 10
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-8 20
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/cc cc /usr/bin/gcc 30
sudo update-alternatives --set cc /usr/bin/gcc
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/c++ c++ /usr/bin/g++ 30
sudo update-alternatives --set c++ /usr/bin/g++
sudo update-alternatives --config gcc
sudo update-alternatives --config g++

After:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ gcc --version
gcc (Raspbian 8.3.0-6+rpi1) 8.3.0
Copyright (C) 2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE

jomoenginer over 5 years ago in reply to sokol07

Fair enough.

I suspect there are folks out there who bought up what they could so they could re-sale the Pico at a higher price. I'm seeing these on sites like Amazon for up to $19 US and companies such as waveshare and Vilros selling kits with a Pico in it.

It's like GameStop stock for the Miicros.
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