Raspberry Pi Pico — (Review)
In the electronics industry, development boards play a major role for electronics enthusiasts and professionals. In recent days, many development boards are available out of which only some get to the top-notch positions.
On 22nd Jan 2020, Raspberry pi officially launched a new development board called RP2040. Raspberry pi Pico has a lot of new features and compactable when compared to other boards available in the market. Pi pico can be used by beginners and experts for various purposes from controlling applications to modern applications. Pico pins control the environment for our applications. Pico is compatible with C as well as micro python. Getting started with raspberry pi pico is easy and adaptable. The drag and drop technique in pico makes it easier for beginners. Pi pico is specially developed by a newly designed microcontroller chip.
Users get to learn about the peripheral set, SPI, I2C, and so many protocols. Pi Pico has a customized peripheral set.
Raspberry pi officially provides a special handbook for a brand new microcontroller called Pi Pico. The handbook contains full guidelines like how to install micro python to getting a grip like a crisp.
Cost-wise, pico is so cheap and comfortable to all. Raspberry pi provides a Pi pico microcontroller board for $4 (U.S). Its size is much similar to Arduino nano, a single-sided 51x21mm 1mm thick PCB with a micro-USB port.
Specs:
It’s built on Raspberry Pi’s own in-house silicon. The dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ chip, 264KB of RAM and support for 16MB of off-flash memory (2MB is onboard) may not sound like much, but they’re reportedly powerful for the class with a strong performance for tasks like machine learning. More importantly, it’s built to be flexible — the 30 GPIO pins, USB 1.1 controller (plus USB mass storage mode) and other additions should help it interface with whatever project you’re working on.
Pico: with no HDMI and USB Ports. Pi Pico needs a computer in order to be useful. The Raspberry Pi Pico is platform agnostic and it will work with Windows, Mac and Linux machines. Pico needs a computer in order to be useful. The Raspberry Pi Pico is platform agnostic and it will work with Windows, Mac and Linux machines.
We first tested Micro Python; a version of Python 3 developed by Damien George for microcontrollers, installation of Micro Python requires a UF2 file to be copied to the Pico. By pressing the BOOTSEL button as we insert the micro USB cable to the computer, we see a driving pop up. After copying the file, we can access the Raspberry Pi Pico as a serial device which provides access to the Python Shell. To write code and save files to the Pico we needed an editor and the official choice for beginners is Thonny. Installation was very easy and we were soon writing code to flash an LED and react to input from a PIR sensor. Two features that are new to the Raspberry Pi world are Programmable IO (PIO) and analog inputs. PIO is a versatile hardware interface that can be used to create interfaces such as I2C, SPI, I2S, and even VGA / DPI.
For programming Micro python is very easy and compatable: Adams said that micro python is the best language for programming in Pi, but pointed out the C is the language for low-level embedded chips. Pico could used in an arm assembler.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is an interesting kit. It is more like Arduino than Raspberry Pi and so the lines are a little blurry. If you need a Raspberry Pi in a small space with Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, buy a Raspberry Pi Zero W. If you want to embed a control board into a project and have it work quickly and reliably then the Pico is for you.
