Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I like the RP2040

dgroshev.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 413 posts

Re: I like the RP2040

#351

Post by steve_adams_86 »

nickcw wrote: post #31

If you are an electronics hobbyist but don't want to make/design your own surface mount boards (like me) there are lots of very accessible RP2040 boards at very low prices. I've used it in the Raspbery Pi Pico ($5) which comes on a nice board with lots of IO. There is a W version for a bit more with WiFi. If you don't mind slightly less IO then you can order an RP-2040 Zero. I got 6 off AliExpress for about $12. Thes…

I love the tiny RP2040 boards. I’ve got a few little projects based on the adafruit QT Py. I do wish there was a wireless version. There is if you use the ESP32 QT, but not RP2040 as far as I can see.

Re: I like the RP2040

#352

Post by petre »

jsbdudh wrote: post #312
boznz wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Don't worry. No one is bothering with it outside of the hobbist market because it needs an external SPI flash chip, which one cannot protect by programming fuses. Your code is left unprotected, the Chinese can easily clone your product and put millions of units on the market. The ESP chips are a better pick even with all the bugs involved. It's quite typical of the Chinese manufacturers to have like 30 models of some product and release a few new ones every few years. The ESP is no different.

Re: I like the RP2040

#353

Post by card_zero »

teytra wrote: post #326
triyambakam wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

This confuse us foreigners trying to use the English language even more than it must confuse regular english speakers. Not only did you (you guys, y'all, plural you, whatever...) mix up ye with you, using only the object form, but also started using it for thou and thee. Also, it was thy/thine not yours in the singular form. I suggest you "fix" your language by reintroducing these words, they (plural they) are not co…

I'll give it a shot, but what about the grammatical singular agreement of the rest of the sentence? Should I leave my second-person verbs in the plural, as in you do, you have, or modify them, as in thou dost, thou hast?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-est#Middle_English

I guess you're basically asking me to speak dialectical Yorkshire.

Re: I like the RP2040

#354

Post by LoganDark »

loudmax wrote: post #335
triyambakam wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Some time around the year 1500, English speakers stopped addressing each other as "thee" in favor of the plural form "you". The singular "thee" is intimate and informal, but might be considered rude in the wrong context. So using the more polite plural form "you" in all contexts is a safer option. Many young people seem to use the gender-neutral "they" rather than "he" or "she", even when the gender is known and is u…

> Many young people seem to use the gender-neutral "they" rather than "he" or "she", even when the gender is known and is unambiguous. This may turn out to be a fad, or it may be a similar generational shift in the language.

I don't know if it's generational, but on the internet it's less clear what someone's gender is, and assumptions have a decent chance of being wrong. The result is that I typically try my best to default to "they" for anyone who hasn't asked me to use different pronouns.

Re: I like the RP2040

#355

Post by uncletaco »

opello wrote: post #308
uncletaco wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. Brook boards always added like an extra $100 dollars to any custom or DIY fight stick. The reinvigoration came because sticks that used to be $250 new are now closer to $100 and in some cases less, particularly leverless controllers. If you've heard of the Haute 42 or any of the countless leverless controllers that have been flooding Ali Express, Amazon, and other sites they're possible because of the fir…

I remember spending $75-$200 for MadCatz/Hori/... sticks when I was more involved with the fighting game scene around 10 years ago. Customizing an OEM stick or doing something DIY for an arcade cabinet was doable with a donor controller. This all hangs on what "reinvigorated" means and I'm fine conceding the ground of not paying close attention in the intervening decade. I didn't think it was prohibitive back then, m…

15 years ago it was maybe $50-$150. As recently as 4 years ago it was more like $200+ and hope for a sale. Top of the line around a decade ago was a madcatz te or razer panthera for $200. The DIY aspect and ease of changing internal parts got harder with most sticks released in the past 5 years.

Brook boards alleviated some of that but that was still an extra $50-$100 depending on the vendor and available supplies and some hardware hacking that a lot of people were unprepared to do. Those who were willing to hack were hit hard because most fight sticks were taken off the market from back then and people got a bug up their butt about value during lockdown these old fight sticks started showing up for as much as $400 on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. A 9 year old panthera was being sold for as much as a brand new Victrix. The market was rough. It still is for secondhand fight sticks.

This is why gp2040 was reinvigorating. With cheap pcbs and ready made firmware came cheap controllers. $50 gets you a 3d printed leverless. $150 gets you an aluminum leverless. There are mini boards that are just keypads with thumb sticks running the same firmware as full sized fight sticks with dual analog levers. You’re starting to see the same explosion in ideas and customization we saw in the keyboard space like 8 years ago.

Re: I like the RP2040

#356

Post by dgroshev »

galangalalgol wrote: post #341
dgroshev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up cutting a section on Rust support from the post, but if you're open to Rust (iirc you were sceptical at some point?), async Rust is really pleasant to use in embedded. Dario Nieuwenhuis, one of the main people behind Embassy, gave a great overview talk at RustNL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7NtzyP9q8E

A bit late to the thread but it is still on the front page. I've got some esp32 risc-v eval boards I've meant to mess with, but I'm nervous about their availability due to political instability and also while the rust support seems pretty great, I don't really know what is going on down in the hal and whatnot. Is rust on the 2040 well supported? Is it too well supported? Is it well enough documented that I could star…

If I get your question right, you still need some host software (like a rust compiler)! It's not exactly micropython experience.

The bare minimum would be one of the examples [1] compiled with a Rust compiler and then transformed into a .uf2 file with elf2uf2 [2]. You can then just drag and drop the .uf2 file into the "mass storage device" presented by the bootloader. To get the bootloader to mount, you press a button on a Raspberry Pico (or short two outputs if you're using bare RP2040) while plugging it in.

You'll probably want a debug probe [3] driven by probe-rs [4] at some point, it's just much more convenient to flash and debug with it.

[1]: https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy/tree/main/examples/rp/...

[2]: https://github.com/JoNil/elf2uf2-rs

[3]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/d...

[4]: https://probe.rs/

Re: I like the RP2040

#357

Post by demondemidi »

vardump wrote: post #340
demondemidi wrote: post #332

Does the RPI boot rom have DFU built in? If not, it can be bricked.

It's literally a ROM. You can't overwrite a ROM. There's no flash or EEPROM on the chip at all.

You don’t understand. If there is no DFU the next application cannot be fixed if it broken. Hence bricked. If the boot rom goes right to the sd card image then there is no problem.

Almost all embedded devices have a secondary boot loader.

Do you understand my question now?

Re: I like the RP2040

#358

Post by petsfed »

floating-io wrote: post #289
petsfed wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only does a module reduce implementation complexity dramatically, standardization skips every engineer potentially making their own dumb component placement mistakes. And we've never found a way around that for the decades we've been putting Atmel, STM, TI, Ambiq, Nordic, etc chips in our designs... There's an intern 2 yards away from me who will be wrestling with getting the right components in place around an…

> but if you want to actually sell your products, you still have to go through the process of RF certification (although at a lower cost. Only you can decide if the higher upfront cost of using a module vs. spinning your own is offset by the lower certification cost) I doubt it was your intention given the disclaimer there, but based on my own research into this issue, this is a highly misleading statement, especiall…

I've been through the full FCC certification process for an intentional transmitter, and it is pretty labyrinthine, on top of being very expensive (I recall $30k, but I don't have access to that company's financials anymore).

Its certainly true that a module can save you a lot of money for small volumes. Its actually pretty easy to figure out where the tipping point is: Its the difference in certification costs divided by the difference in BOM costs. Its a little bit more complicated when you factor in economies of scale, but by and large, module costs don't fall off as steeply as individual components do.

Re: I like the RP2040

#360

Post by colejohnson66 »

guenthert wrote: post #318
vardump wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But then you have to deal with TI’s garbage called CCStudio
Post reply on HN