[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi Enters Microcontroller Game with $4 Pico
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Raspberry Pi Enters Microcontroller Game with $4 Pico
Author : dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp
Score : 185 points
Date : 2021-01-22 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hackaday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.com)
| leoncvlt wrote:
| All right, let's say you know absolutely nothing about the world
| of microcontrollers but you think this looks cool and cheap. What
| webpages or resources would you recommend to get started and
| learn more? Do you first to need to get into electronics and
| circuits? But before that, get a foundation on how electricity
| works? And even before that, get a good grasp on how to create
| the universe?
| nayuki wrote:
| More info and related products:
| https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-n...
| [deleted]
| jascii wrote:
| Does anyone know if you can keep the GPIO "programmable logic"
| part powered on while putting the cores in low power mode? That
| could make for some interesting applications.
| ramary wrote:
| Yeah that would be really cool, can imagine this being useful
| for very simple if this then that logic in dealing with
| peripherals. e.g. handling a broader range of sensor input and
| peripheral interrupts without having to turn the core on to do
| processing.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| There are two low power modes. Technically either should be
| able to let the PIO continue to run. I'll explain all three
| power modes.
|
| NORMAL: You get to select what is clocked here, except for the
| CPU. CPU will turn off clocking of some of its components if
| you are running a sleep instruction like WFE/WFI.
|
| SLEEP: If both processors are in a sleep state, and no active
| DMA requests are running it automatically switches to this
| mode. You can once again configure what components are clocked
| here. So you could leave say just RTC and PIO powered up. This
| is less of a true low power mode, and more of just a way to
| automatically switch to a different set of clocked components
| if the bus is idle, so as to further reduce power consumption.
|
| DORMANT: Ring and crystal oscillators stopped, zero dynamic
| power used in default configurations. Only a pin or RTC
| interrupt can wake the system from this state. Note that any
| externally supplied clocks will continue to be routed, and PLLs
| will run if not powered down. Thus technically this mode can be
| used to fully stop the CPUs while letting other accessories run
| from an external clock. The nominal intended usage is to
| continue to let the real time clock run, but the PIO could be
| run too/instead.
| jascii wrote:
| Thank you for the clear and concise explanation!
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I'm happy to see an ARM-based microcontroller, but I my two
| questions would be:
|
| 1. Why didn't they use the same GPIO header as a full-sized
| Raspberry Pi? That would allow people to reuse some of the same
| headers. Seems like a missed opportunity there?
|
| 2. Since it has no WiFi and it costs more, this compares
| unfavorably with the good old ESP8266 in some important respects.
| Why would you pick the Pico?
|
| EDIT: I'm being downvoted to hell. I'm sure that the new Pico
| will find buyers, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it sells
| out based on brand recognition alone. I'm just trying to ask some
| legitimate questions as to what this has to offer over the
| competition in the microcontroller space, which is a crowded
| market, and how it fits into the existing RPi ecosystem.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| The Pico has more GPIO pins and larger PROM etc. - it looks
| like more of a replacement/competitor for the Arduino boards at
| the moment.
|
| I'd guess that in a few versions/years they'll come out with an
| embedded Wifi onboard.
| jascii wrote:
| 1. That would make the device larger and wouldn't provide
| compatibility anyhow. 2. The street price of ESP8266 seems to
| be $6.49, which is more then $4.00. I imagine the rpi board
| uses less current, and the programable logic in the gpio's
| gives some interesting opportunities.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Actually, the most popular ESP32 (DevkitC) board can be had
| for $4 or so: https://aliexpress.com/item/4001076883280.html
| sargun wrote:
| Or, the ESP32-C3, which is <$2.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| That's just the chip, not the board.
| sargun wrote:
| The dev board (WROOM) is an additional $2.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| Link? The dev boards I'm familiar with are $10. Not that
| I really care for hobby purposes - I'm not buying 100s of
| them.
| sargun wrote:
| There's no publicly released pricing AFAIK, since the
| board is still in preproduction. I think the dev board is
| more expensive -- and targeted to be $8. $8 for a board
| with WiFi is pretty good.
| jascii wrote:
| I haven't benchmarked them, but the ESP32-C3 only has a
| single core, right? I also assume the wifi and bluetooth
| functionality will increase current use.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Would it make the device larger? The RPi GPIO is 40 pins
| (2x20). This board has two 20 pin headers (40 pins total).
| You could have the RPi GPIO off to one side and it would take
| the same total area. Maybe it's not as fun to route the
| multilayer PCB to achieve this, but it would fit better with
| the existing RPi brand/ecosystem.
|
| As for the ESP8266 (not ESP32), you can find them on eBay
| below $3 shipped. The ESP8266 is already quite fast and
| capable for a microcontroller (it's overkill for many
| applications). I agree that more IO pins could be a
| differentiating factor.
| kingosticks wrote:
| 2. If you need wireless, you need an ESP board. If you don't,
| you might prefer the more performant Pico. The last section of
| the article also gives some reasons.
| swsieber wrote:
| There's an interesting thread over on reddit about supporting
| Rust on this - apparently the multi-core architecure is different
| enough from a normal CPU to cause issues:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/l1uwyu/would_it_be_po...
|
| Though in the mean time running code on just one of the cores
| shouldn't take a lot of work.
| epx wrote:
| My dream board would be a full Raspberry with an Arduino-like uC
| included on the same board, for easy I/O.
| jrockway wrote:
| That sounds like a Beaglebone Black. It has "programmable
| realtime units" built in, which are basically microcontrollers.
| They are well-integrated with the host computer; there is a
| mailbox passing messages between the host machine and the PRUs.
| No need to invent a serial protocol for communicating -- just
| put your c struct in there.
| na85 wrote:
| +1 for the Beaglebone Black, a great little board that
| doesn't get as much publicity as the Raspberry and other
| boards.
| NoNameHaveI wrote:
| Plus, Beagle is 100% open source. Want to mod and etch your
| own PCB? You can.
| avian wrote:
| Texas Instruments AM335x the BeagleBone uses is also
| fully documented. There's a huge PDF manual publicly
| available that describes every functionality. It's such a
| welcome change from Raspberry Pi's mostly undocumented
| Broadcom SoCs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think this was (one of) the things the RP2040 was designed to
| do; they know that a lot of people strap an Arduino to the Pi
| as an IO expander or to handle real-time elements, so they've
| built their own.
|
| They already did a peripheral chip for the RPi. Now they have
| their own microcontroller. I suspect in a few revisions they'll
| have their own host processor to replace the Broadcom one ...
|
| It's a great achievement for a very small team.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> a lot of people strap an Arduino to the Pi as an IO
| expander or to handle real-time elements,=
|
| Including me. I actually prefer this to the GPIO, though it
| adds one more component. An advantage is that I can move my
| hardware projects between RPi and other computers in the
| house including my nice comfy and fast desktop workstation.
| With a bit of care, my Python support software runs the same
| on RPi and Windows with no code changes.
|
| Also, if you keep things within the Arduino ecosystem, it's
| easy to upgrade or downgrade your microcontroller as needed,
| with only minor changes to your embedded code. What I'd like
| to know is if the development environment for this board is
| as nice (or better, can always hope) than the Arduino
| environment.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. I think this could work great in
| the Pi Zero format - compact, wifi + mass storage if needed and
| with the right wiring you could even flash the controller
| remotely via wifi.
|
| Could be a nice mix for projects where the size of another PCB
| would be problematic. The target audience would probably be
| smaller and I doubt the RPi Foundation would be interested
| considering their focus on education, but I would probably buy
| one.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| There are several DIY drone boards that have this kind of
| setup. Usually it is an arduino mounted to a Raspberry pi with
| an i2c channel for communication, but they seem to be getting
| more and more popular.
| war1025 wrote:
| Would this be a good stepping stone for someone wanting to learn
| more about microcontroller type stuff?
|
| I bought an Arduino starter pack a few years ago, and it was
| neat, but I never ended up doing much with it beyond the first
| week or so.
|
| I guess this would maybe suffer the same fate.
|
| What projects do people do with microcontrollers that don't just
| end up being silly gimmicks?
| yummypaint wrote:
| If you're into music production making your own MIDI
| controllers, electronic drum pads, sequencers, filters,
| compressors, etc can quickly save thousands of dollars. Plus
| there is nothing like performing on your own hardware.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Good question. I'd probably try to automate my home a little
| bit...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| The single most useful thing I've built with a hobbyist board
| is a pomodoro timer.
|
| I also built my own wifi speaker using a Raspberry Pi Zero W
| and an open source implementation of the AirPort protocol, but
| we've stopped using it because it was flaky and needed regular
| reboots. Bluetooth turned out to be (barely) less annoying.
| emilecantin wrote:
| I've done a few "smart-home"-type projects.
|
| One of them is an e-ink display outside my office door that
| either displays today's date, or a warning sign stating that
| I'm in a meeting.
|
| The warning is triggered by a switch on another microcontroller
| that sits on my desk (an M5 Stack, so it has a nice enclosure &
| screen).
| war1025 wrote:
| So flipping my original question around a little, how did you
| get into learning these things?
|
| I've always wished I had taken a hardware course or two while
| in University. I can't seem to think of anything practical
| enough to keep my motivation while I deal with learning about
| all the actual hardware bits.
| emilecantin wrote:
| Honestly, I just used ESPHome for all of this
| (https://esphome.io/).
|
| I mean, I've written code for microcontrollers before, but
| it's hard to beat something where all the building blocks
| are already done for you; leaving you only the job or
| assembling them in the product you want.
|
| If you know "normal" programming (I do web dev), it's
| relatively easy to get an Arduino and start copy-and-
| pasting example code until you've got something cool. The
| syntax itself isn't too complex, and most of the really
| hard stuff already has a library built for it.
|
| Arduino code can also be used on the ESP8266 / ESP32, which
| is an amazing, <$2 (shipped!) microcontroller that's Wifi-
| enabled.
| wiremine wrote:
| Related conversation from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25856291
| beervirus wrote:
| This is pretty tempting. I don't know exactly how stripped-down
| MicroPython is yet, but I'm guessing it's going to be a lot
| easier for me to deal with than learning C like I'd have to with
| a lot of microcontrollers.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yes! And CircuitPython from Adafruit.
|
| I have been turned off from some Arduino projects in the past
| due to the C/C++ requirements, but MicroPython apparently runs
| on many microcontrollers and makes it pretty simple if you know
| basic Python.
|
| Once you get a design working, if you need the efficiency and
| power gains from C, then you can drop down to that level. But
| with the Pico having a 133 MHz processor, the overhead for many
| projects isn't too bad, and it's still going to be a lot more
| efficient than running something equivalent on a Pi Zero.
| pjmlp wrote:
| My first PC was a 386 SX running at 20 MHz, capable of
| running plenty of high level languages, when not doing games.
|
| Most modern microcontrollers are quite alright for something
| like Python indeed.
| gchadwick wrote:
| Whilst there are certainly other boards with more features/higher
| specs at similar prices I think the pico has a few things going
| for it
|
| 1. It's at cheap ebay/aliexpress prices but is a first party
| board supported by the chip manufacturer, not a third party
| clone.
|
| 2. The full raspberry pi ecosystem has a good range of hardware
| and software, the pico will hopefully see the same.
|
| 3. The internal architecture has some fun features. The DMA
| engine supports chaining DMA channels and one set of DMA
| operations can program and trigger another channel. Plus you can
| trigger transactions on when they're needed by the endpoint or on
| a timer. You can program in complex behaviours with this and just
| set it off and go without needing further CPU control.
|
| More unique than the DMA is the PIO, 8 programmable state
| machines that have FIFOs and port access. This allows you to add
| support for protocols you don't have hardware for. This avoids
| bit banging and gives precise real-time control. You can do
| things like drive VGA and there's even an HDMI demo (possibly a
| bit too hacky to be used in production though).
|
| I've just had one arrive today, going to spend the weekend seeing
| what I can do with just DMA and PIO whilst the CPU sits idle,
| maybe dealing with the occasional interrupt.
| comboy wrote:
| What could be the reason to use DMA on a hobby micro-controller
| board? Honest question, I'm just curious. I can imagine some
| high reliability production systems that may prefer micro vs
| CPU, but why would you bother doing any more advanced graphics
| or anything like that on a microcontroller? I mean I played
| with VGA on arduino but that was because there were no cheap
| SBCc back then.
| timonoko wrote:
| VHF radio transmitter? You construct some complex wave
| pattern and then push it out high-speed via DMA.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| > one set of DMA operations can program and trigger another
| channel.
|
| I once worked around a very unfortunate hardware shortcoming in
| a DMA engine by doing exactly this. Each channel supported a
| list of descriptors, so I used the last descriptor to actually
| perform DMA operations on the configuration registers of the
| other channel.
|
| The possibilities are endless with this kinda stuff
| stinos wrote:
| _The possibilities are endless_
|
| So is the time wasted when there are bugs in the docs :P
| Don't remember the exact chip, but it was on the first job I
| had and it took me weeks to find out why the thing didn't
| want to do what I told it to. Turned out some names of
| registers were swapped in the docs. But indeed, once I
| figured that out, it was really nice to work with and things
| like interleaving data from multiple ADCs just worked with
| basically no CPU interaction.
| jarmitage wrote:
| Thanks for this summary.
|
| I am excited about the DMA and PIOs having used BeagleBoard
| PRUs, but what about the quality of the ADCs/DACs?
|
| Isn't all the talk of hard real-time applications and so on
| somewhat moot if those aren't high quality enough?
|
| (afraid I haven't had time to read the datasheet yet!)
| akiselev wrote:
| From the devboard datasheet:
|
| _> The RP2040 ADC does not have an on-board reference and
| therefore uses its own power supply as a reference. On Pico
| the ADC_AVDD pin (the ADC supply) is generated from the SMPS
| 3.3V by using an R-C filter (201 ohms into 2.2mF)_
|
| Which doesn't sound promising and I don't see a DAC in the
| RP2040 datasheet.
| jarmitage wrote:
| Right. I wonder if the Arduino version will be better for
| this, or whether we might need to wait for future boards
| from RPi.
| mlyle wrote:
| It's good and bad. Nice that they've filtered AVCC pretty
| heavily-- 360Hz corner frequency-- lots of microcontroller
| boards don't.
|
| Less nice that the ADC scale will be affected by power
| supply offset, though that all depends upon how "good" the
| board 3V3 is. The bandgap and error amplifier on the DC-DC
| converter IC is good at least-- max +/- 1%.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| 4. It's available ~'everywhere'.
|
| RPi foundation has done a great job at making it's product
| available to buy at the time of announcement in over 50
| countries and I think that's underrated.
|
| It shows 5 different websites for me to buy in India, which is
| not usually the case here for new hardware except few
| exceptions like Nvidia Jetson; if at all they ever make it to
| the country. Also RPi foundation/partners seems to be actively
| working with the Govt. to keep the prices competitive.
|
| To give you a comparison, PinePhone costs >$200 (+tax) to get
| it here that is if at all it doesn't get blocked at the customs
| due to licensing requirements for telecommunication hardware,
| taxes for CBU(Completely Built Unit) smart phones, blockade on
| shipments from the country to the North. That's a tragedy
| considering huge number of Linux enthusiasts in the country and
| that alternate smartphone OS can indeed help Govt.'s self
| reliance goals.
|
| P.S. That was not to diss on Pine64's efforts, but to show the
| state of enthusiast hardware availability in India.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| +1. It is amazing seeing how well they've managed this.
|
| There were educational launch videos out from the authorised
| Indian resellers on the day of launch, even.
| [deleted]
| worik wrote:
| "...doesn't get blocked at the customs due to licensing
| requirements for telecommunication hardware, taxes for
| CBU(Completely Built Unit) smart phones, blockade on
| shipments from the country to the North...."
|
| OMG. I had forgotten. What a mess. Politics is a drag
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Is there a good guide that you recommend on the PIO or DMA
| features?
| gchadwick wrote:
| I've just been reading the datasheet here: https://datasheets
| .raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.p...
|
| It does have some examples and the Pico SDK has various PIO
| programs you can look at for inspiration. The getting started
| page links to a few projects including the HDMI/DVI:
| https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/pico/getting-
| start...
| tyingq wrote:
| Note that the HDMI/DVI code overclocks the Cortex M0 from
| its normal 133Mhz to 252Mhz. So it's a cool hack, but I
| think it would have wonky behavior. https://github.com/Wren
| 6991/picodvi/blob/34bc82555860de4b35e...
| duskwuff wrote:
| On the upside, it looks as though the production silicon
| has a lot of performance headroom. The 800x600 mode
| overclocks it all the way to 400 MHz!
| tyingq wrote:
| That is cool, and at $4, I suppose the risk is pretty low
| :)
| trebligdivad wrote:
| It's obvious whoever designed that, did it so that they
| could do fun things with it; very flexible PIO and DMA with
| lots of neat corners; and mention of fun things like 8080
| bus interfacing and the like.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > [PIO] allows you to add support for protocols you don't have
| hardware for.
|
| PHY level support, yes. But nothing higher than that. You would
| still need to implement the protocol in software for the most
| part. So at 133Mhz, it's probably fast enough to toggle a CAN
| transceiver correctly, but would have very little comprehension
| of bus arbitration or CRC or what makes a message valid (RTR,
| IDE, DLC, etc).
|
| It's very cool, but the example they used of making a simple
| waveform for the serial driven LEDs is more what they were
| going for.
|
| That example is pretty much already taken care of with an SPI
| or PWM that runs off DMA though. You can easily make a waveform
| for those LEDs. I've never understood why the enthusiasts use
| bit banging and special hardware.
| jmiskovic wrote:
| Didn't study Pico but I don't think PIO can interface CAN
| bus.
|
| The physical layer uses differential wired-AND scheme where
| any device can pull it into dominant state but recessive
| state is possible only if no device is driving the bus. In
| most cases CAN requires a dedicated HW transceiver, I would
| be pleasantly surprised if Pico can pull it off without
| external components.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Yes. Did you notice where I wrote _"fast enough to toggle a
| CAN transceiver"_.
|
| The point is the PIO may be great at wiggling pins, but
| that doesn't mean you can "support hardware protocols" you
| don't have peripherals for. It means it gets you a pin
| wiggler, and the rest of the protocol would have to be
| software.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| And a 120 ohm termination at the end of the bus.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This is not a required item. It is suggested that the
| termination is 120ohms, but depends entirely on the
| length of the bus and number of modules. You _can_ have
| short runs of can with no transceiver and no termination.
| zootboy wrote:
| CAN uses a dominant/recessive transmission method,
| similar to I2C. The termination resistors are absolutely
| required, as they are what drive the bus back to the
| recessive state.
|
| Perhaps you were thinking of RS-485, which actively
| drives both bus states and therefore can get away with
| unterminated buses at low bitrates / short runs.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| No, I was not thinking RJ485 where termination is
| optional.
|
| You are forgetting that CAN can work at short distances
| without being a differential bus at all.
|
| I mention this where I wrote "no transceiver _AND_ no
| termination".
| monocasa wrote:
| I think CAN is the special case here, since it more or less
| requires hard real time feedback within a bit cell. Almost
| all of the other weird protocols don't do that, so you can
| have the simple scan in/out handling the phy like you said
| and are no longer dedicating a full core 80% of your time to
| bit twiddling.
| emilecantin wrote:
| It's a game-changer in the hobbyist marine-electronics world.
| The marine electronics field is littered with various weird
| proprietary protocols that are _almost_ the same as open
| standards in other industries, but not quite. Examples
| include:
|
| - NMEA0183, which is electrically RS-422 (similar to the
| ubiquitous RS-232, but only sometimes)
|
| - NMEA2000, which is basically CAN
|
| - Seatalk, which looks like NMEA0183 but is electrically
| inverted (1 is 0 and vice versa) and also uses weird byte
| lengths (9-bit?)
|
| - Seatalk-ng, which is basically NMEA2000 with a few more
| message types
|
| A $4 device that can translate arbitrary weird PHY protocols
| into a bitstream on a USB port is awesome in this world.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I am beyond skeptical this will be adequate for NMEA/CAN
| for the very reason myself and others explain in the rest
| of the thread.
|
| This will get you wiggling output pins, not a replacement
| for dedicated protocol hardware or a actual programmable
| logic.
| m463 wrote:
| > Whilst there are certainly other boards with...
|
| This _IS_ the other boards!
|
| I think if you look here:
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-n...
|
| Scroll down and you'll see the RP2040 has been released on many
| boards simultaneously.
|
| - Adafruit Feather RP 2040
|
| - Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP 2040
|
| - Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect
|
| - Pimoroni PicoSystem
|
| - Pimoroni Pico Explorer Base
|
| - SparkFun Thing Plus - RP2040
|
| - SparkFun MicroMod RP2040 Processor
|
| - SparkFun Pro Micro - RP2040
| bchip wrote:
| I wish they would of added wifi and bluetooth to the board. This
| could of replaced esp32s.
| VoxPelli wrote:
| Eg Arduino will launch a board with that, the core here is the
| new chip, not the Pico board, lots of manufacturers will build
| boards with the chip
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Note that Arduino is coming out with a new Nano board for the
| same chip (new RP2040) with 16MB of flash and wireless built in.
| No word on pricing yet, though:
| https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-t...
| alpaca128 wrote:
| That's great news, the 2MB flash are not quite enough for some
| projects and this could fit the bill for me.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Wireless is the key feature for me opens up so many more
| possibilities
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| Wireless is key for me for my hobbyist projects.
| fermienrico wrote:
| By "Wireless", which specific protocol do you mean?
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I don't
| Unklejoe wrote:
| Does anyone know if the chip can be purchased from distributors
| like Mouser or Digikey? If not, will it be eventually?
|
| This is the first thing I look at before deciding to invest in
| learning a new chip. I specifically look for something that is
| guaranteed to be available for a long time and not change.
| zargon wrote:
| This is the first thing I wanted to know too. From
| raspberrypi.org:
|
| > Are you planning to make RP2040 available to customers?
|
| > We hope to make RP2040 broadly available in the second
| quarter of 2021.
| [deleted]
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I built a small project using a Raspberry Pi Zero. Wanted to use
| it in my car. One frustration is that it takes 30+ seconds to
| boot and show signs of life on power-on.
|
| Wondering how much faster I can make this, or a Pico? Before I
| lose all the benefits of Linux.
| chadaustin wrote:
| The AVR/Arduino boards boot instantly which is one of their big
| advantages here. I imagine the Pico will be the same.
| wamburu wrote:
| Have you tried TinyCore http://tinycorelinux.net ? Might be
| faster.
| regularfry wrote:
| You want to take a look at buildroot-based approaches. They're
| not quite instant-on, but they're tolerable.
| https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam is a good example.
| SamBam wrote:
| This looks great. In seems from a rough glance at the feature set
| that there are plenty of boards that do more for not much more
| money, but my guess is that this is designed mostly for the
| beginner/educational set, where everything can be nicely
| standardized and not the Cambrian Explosion of the *duino boards.
| Is that about right?
|
| Speaking of education, does anyone have a favorite mechanical
| device (toy car, robot, etc) that is compatible with a
| microcontroller that can be used for teaching little kids? (Month
| 10 of learning-from-home dragging on here...)
| giantg2 wrote:
| "but my guess is that this is designed mostly for the
| beginner/educational set, where everything can be nicely
| standardized and not the Cambrian Explosion of the *duino
| boards"
|
| That was my take on it. I first saw it and thought of my
| adurino nanos. Then reading the specs, I wondered why not use
| an ESP32 with wireless etc. I think they are only $3 more.
| Standardization was all I was left with.
| regularfry wrote:
| It's also a nice and relatively straightforward first step
| into custom silicon, which is probably going to turn out to
| be quite an important strategic move for them.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I wouldn't have thought so, but I guess it could. I thought
| their whole point was to use existing chips that were low
| cost to promote education. Jumping into custom chips seems
| like an odd move for that, unless they want to monetize.
| regularfry wrote:
| They've got scale now. I think that's the difference.
| detaro wrote:
| the PIO part as far as I know does not have a match in anything
| else in that market segment. I was sceptical too at first, but
| it seems like this actually does add something new to the
| market. More examples will be around, but e.g. the first demo
| going around driving two DVI screens is already pretty neat for
| what's possible, and other devices would struggle with.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| Do you have a link to the demo with two DVI screens?
| detaro wrote:
| https://github.com/Wren6991/picodvi
| davemp wrote:
| PIO feels like a lateral progression from the arm+fpga socs
| that have been floating around for awhile. So you could
| already get socs with even more powerful configurable logic
| behind their IO. Most FPGAs support partial reconfiguration
| so they can be reconfigured dynamically as well.
|
| PIO is still pretty cool from an ease of use and cost
| perspective though.
| Bigpet wrote:
| Seems to be clocked a lot higher than the lower cost arduino
| models. And has a little more memory.
|
| So it might be worse suited to battery-powered applications,
| unless you do some power managment.
|
| Not that I know what you would necessarily do with more of that
| compute.
| DanBC wrote:
| Have a look at kits for BBC Micro:Bit.
|
| EG, this one gives you a nice breakout board and a few sensors
| and switches. It also gives you an instruction book. You'll
| also need to buy the actual Micro:Bit too. This kit has a
| website for more projects here:
| https://tinkercademy.com/microbit/
|
| You program the micro:bit in MakeCode in a webbrowser. That
| also has an emulated device so you can see what it's like
| without having the actual board.
|
| And you can program the Micro:Bit with Python.
|
| It looks spendy, and it is, but the colour-coding of the cables
| and the keyways of the sensor PCBs make it friendly for
| children.
|
| There are lots of kits for micro:bit
| https://www.elecfreaks.com/micro-bit/kits.html
|
| You may want to wait for Version 2 to be released.
| https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-95670/l/introdu...
| slezyr wrote:
| > You may want to wait for Version 2 to be released
|
| You can already buy it from Ali Express.
| ElectroNomad wrote:
| Can anyone suggest BLE-only microcontroller?
|
| I wanted to build a smart-lock, but all the boards either also
| have Wi-Fi on-board (that eats a lot of power) or don't have
| anything at all.
| tpolzer wrote:
| The nrf52840 has a reasonable programming interface, good power
| consumption and can be bought as a USB breakout dongle for 10$.
| montecarl wrote:
| I've just started to get into microcontrollers, but I have been
| playing with boards based on the NRF52840[0]. I'm using them to
| build an air quality monitor to measure CO2[1], volatile
| organic compounds[2], temperature and humidity.
|
| I'd recommend the Adafruit NRF52840 Feather[3] or if you want a
| smaller version (that doesn't include a LiPo battery charger)
| get the ItsyBitsy nRF52840 Express[4].
|
| I haven't used the Arduino or CircuitPython programming
| environments, I've just been using Arm GCC and Nordic's SDK.
|
| [0] https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-
| wi...
|
| [1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4867
|
| [2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3709
|
| [3] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4062
|
| [4] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4481
| roland35 wrote:
| Hackaday has good reviews of similar small microcontroller
| boards.
|
| - STM32 "Blue Pill": cheap, uses common STM32 ARM parts, but
| generally available on places like ebay/alibaba
|
| - ESP32: has wifi and bluetooth, less good documentation but
| great performance/$
|
| - Raspberry Pico!
| ashtonkem wrote:
| There is some great open source stuff for the ESP32, including
| ESPHome[0]. These are pretty popular for adding functionality
| to Home Assistant where off the shelf parts aren't available.
| The ability to go on low power standby until some condition is
| met appears to be one of the best selling points.
|
| 0 - https://esphome.io/
| fermienrico wrote:
| > less good documentation but great performance/$
|
| Truth couldn't be far from that. Its completely the opposite -
| ESP32 toolchain and docs are superb:
| https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/
|
| And there is ESP32.net: http://esp32.net/
| roland35 wrote:
| maybe it has changed since I last checked it out then! I had
| problems getting started - but it was probably just me.
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