Raspberry Pi Foundation Release Their Own Silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced today their own Raspberry Silicon called Raspberry Pi Pico, a brand-new chip developed in house and built on RP2040.

It was about time for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to release their own silicon, so here it is guys! Meet Raspberry Pi Pico, the result of several years of hard work designed to offer Raspberry Pi owners and anyone else who like building their own hardware high performance for integer workloads, flexible I/O, and low cost.

Raspberry Pi Pico is built on the RP2040 microcontroller chip, which features a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor running at 133MHz, 264KB of on-chip RAM, support for up to 16MB of off-chip flash memory via a dedicated QSPI bus, DMA controller, as well as interpolator and integer divider peripherals.

Additionally, RP2040 comes with 30 GPIO pins, two UARTs, two SPI controllers, two I2C controllers, 16 PWM channels, eight Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines, as well as USB 1.1 controller and PHY with host and device support.

The Raspberry Pi Pico pairs the RP2040 microcontroller chip with 2MB of flash memory and a power supply chip that lets you power the tiny board from a wide range of sources, including a single Lithium-Ion cell battery or two AA batteries.

Other features include a single push button for accessing USB mass-storage mode at boot time or as a general input, a single LED, and the ability to expose 26 of the 30 GPIO pins on the RP2040 microcontroller chip.

“Whether you’re looking for a standalone board for deep-embedded development or a companion to your Raspberry Pi computer, or you’re taking your first steps with a microcontroller, this is the board for you,” said James Adams.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is on sale right now at only $4 USD per unit and comes with complete documentation to support all your future projects, which is available for free here.

And, if that’s not enough for you, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and its partners provide a wide variety of accessories for the Pico, including the 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 board, and SparkFun Pro Micro – RP2040.

Last updated 3 years ago

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