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I like the RP2040

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Re: I like the RP2040

#311

Post by moefh »

gchadwick wrote: post #194
peteforde wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for all of your rational contributions to those many threads, Jeff. It is an extremely weird situation, and a deeply bad look. If I was pressed for an opinion, I would say that I wish Eben had taken the high road and gone all in on supporting PIO despite the tangy mystery aftertaste for the simple reason that it would be a net-positive for developers. The way things stand, migrating away from the Arduino IDE t…

> It is an extremely weird situation, and a deeply bad look I never followed all the ins and outs but from having a quick look through the comments on https://github.com/platformio/platform-raspberrypi/pull/36 the following happened: - Developer independent of RPi opens PR to add RP2040 support to PlatformIO - PlatformIO don't want to merge it, expecting some financial contribution to help maintain the support (seems…

The problem (to me) is that they welcomed that PR and requested corrections until it was in a good enough shape to be accepted, without any indication that it wouldn't be accepted unless/until they had financial support from RPi. That only became clear almost a year after the PR was opened.

Re: I like the RP2040

#312

Post by jsbdudh »

boznz wrote: post #262
MegaDeKay wrote: post #17

The PIO's really are the star of the RP2040 show, giving it a capability that competing chips like the ESP32 can't match. They are appearing all over the place in the console hacking space for this reason. Lower power consumption in steep modes for battery-backed applications would be a welcome addition in any V2 version though.

Availability is the star of the show for me. One IC, long product lifetime, always in stock, after the shitshow that was 2021/2022 I'm not going to bother trying to shave a few cents to compromise this again.

The RP2040 was only available during the last component shortage, since it was a newly released design, not yet implemented in many products.

The IC will be unobtainable in the next shortage, too.

I mean, don't you remember the shortage before where even capacitors were only hardly available?

Re: I like the RP2040

#313

Post by mordae »

peteforde wrote: post #120

I also like the RP2040, but I'd like to explain why I migrated away from it for my current project. First, the drama with PlatformIO really rubbed me the wrong way. I'm taking the side of the developers who are hurt by confusion in tooling. Second, the top of the line ESP32-S3 comes in a module format that can be dropped on a PCB with basically nothing but a few decoupling capacitors. The RP2040 requires careful plac…

> The RP2040 requires careful placement of about a dozen components, including a crystal.

I have had 14yo kids do the PCB layout for RP2040 on our custom handheld console. They had no trouble.

Nor did I with my ~10 boards.

Crystal is the simplest, decoupling can be a chore, but only if you add them too late. Power can be 90% done with a pour under the package.

Re: I like the RP2040

#314

Post by 05 »

moffkalast wrote: post #95
MegaDeKay wrote: post #17

The PIO's really are the star of the RP2040 show, giving it a capability that competing chips like the ESP32 can't match. They are appearing all over the place in the console hacking space for this reason. Lower power consumption in steep modes for battery-backed applications would be a welcome addition in any V2 version though.

Ditto for robotics. 8 PIO units are enough to read and log four quadrature encoders at practically no interrupt cost, so it's possible to build a perfectly performant closed loop controller in something as slow as Micropython.

Many, many cheap MCUs have peripherals that can decode quadrature in hardware. E.g, PCNT on ESP32, timer modes on STM32 etc. Might as well use PIO to implement I2C or UART :)

Re: I like the RP2040

#315

Post by triyambakam »

konstantinua00 wrote: post #305
jsheard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like battery life will probably improve with experience, I was talking to a silicon guy about the RP2040 and they said it's pretty characteristic of a first generation design. The digital logic that can be validated on an FPGA is fine for the most part, but the analog elements are much more difficult to fine tune, hence the poor power consumption, poor ADCs, and lack of internal DACs or opamps in the RP2040, a…

he said?

I was thinking about this. I think there is a trend in English to use they even when the gender is known to indicate a kind of distance from that person. E.g. my guess about the parent poster is that they (he or she in this case, a different usage) may not be very close to the "silicon guy"

Re: I like the RP2040

#316

Post by m-ee »

moffkalast wrote: post #95
MegaDeKay wrote: post #17

The PIO's really are the star of the RP2040 show, giving it a capability that competing chips like the ESP32 can't match. They are appearing all over the place in the console hacking space for this reason. Lower power consumption in steep modes for battery-backed applications would be a welcome addition in any V2 version though.

Ditto for robotics. 8 PIO units are enough to read and log four quadrature encoders at practically no interrupt cost, so it's possible to build a perfectly performant closed loop controller in something as slow as Micropython.

It’s also possible to build a perfectly performant closed loop controller with micropython on an STM32

Re: I like the RP2040

#317

Post by makapuf »

dragontamer wrote: post #229
immibis wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't run Linux on DRAM. You need a CPU.

You can't run anything on an RP2040. There's no Flash or code space. RP2040 sits at an awkward placement. It requires external parts, but low end SPI parts and not the nicer proper RAM like DDR3L or the like. ------ My point is that if you have a design that fundamentally requires external parts like the RP2040, the accurate comparison is against MPUs. Chips that are specifically designed to work with powerful and co…

ESP32 chips also need external SPI Flash, and many STM32 have little flash and QuadSPI with execute from external flash capabilities, so I don't see this as a specificity of RP2040.

Re: I like the RP2040

#318

Post by guenthert »

vardump wrote: post #248
JAlexoid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing ESP32 to RP2040 is like comparing oranges to apples. If you need a lot of IO - you're probably not looking at ESP32. It's just cheap and has WiFi builtin. There are many options for other MCUs, that compare favorably to with RP2040... though majority aren't for the hobbyist market.

> There are many options for other MCUs, that compare favorably to with RP2040 That's pretty interesting, could you list some?

Not sure about favorably, but if it's PIO you're after, there is TI's Sitara family with their PRU. afaics, more functionality for a higher price.

Re: I like the RP2040

#319

Post by dailykoder »

throwaway15968 wrote: post #260
selfmodruntime wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heavily disagree. I‘ve been working with the Espressif ecosystem for a couple of months now and it‘s the best documented microcontroller platform out there.

Completely agreed. ESP-IDF is incredible and the dev experience is miles beyond STM32 (my opinion).

> STM32 (my opinion).

STM32 is horrible, if you don't want to use the HAL.. Everything I used (Atmel, ESP32, rp2040) was better than that - Tho I heard NXP is bad.

Re: I like the RP2040

#320

Post by fest »

05 wrote: post #314
moffkalast wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto for robotics. 8 PIO units are enough to read and log four quadrature encoders at practically no interrupt cost, so it's possible to build a perfectly performant closed loop controller in something as slow as Micropython.

Many, many cheap MCUs have peripherals that can decode quadrature in hardware. E.g, PCNT on ESP32, timer modes on STM32 etc. Might as well use PIO to implement I2C or UART :)

> Might as well use PIO to implement I2C or UART :)

PIO actually came in handy for me when interfacing with an x-ray sensor which had 12 or 14 bits long UART data frame- not many micros have such a flexibility in their UART peripherals.

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