71–80 of 413 posts
If this RPi main chip costs $0.70, why does the finished product currently cost $93.00 (RPi 5)? They're quite expensive nowadays, I miss when you could purchase them for ~$30.00. Meanwhile, Expressif chips are literally everywhere and becoming ever more ubiquitous. Edit: Thanks friends for the correction. It is cool you can still buy an RPi Pico for $13.00 :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bootloader is read-only. What the bootloader loads isn't. If the thing you're trying to boot into is faulty, it doesn't matter because you can just replace the thing the bootloader is trying to load. If the bootloader itself was faulty, the device would be bricked.
To elaborate on the alternative: When the bootloader is not read-only, you can upload another bootloader. This is great in a different way because custom bootloaders allow for more flexibility. For example, you may want to keep two copies of your firmware on the chip: One that you're uploading, and one you can fall back to if the most recent one has problems. This protects you against failure during firmware upload o…
Stage 1 bootloader is the one in ROM and it normally just reads stage 2 from the flash chip. Stage 2 then initialises the flash properly, and you can have further stages like [2] to implement the trial-rollback procedure.
Stage 1 is a safety net, even if the trial-rollback procedure goes terribly wrong the device can still be unbricked over USB.
[1]: https://blog.usedbytes.com/2021/12/pico-serial-bootloader/
TL;DR: he likes it because there's only one version available, whereas most microcontrollers have many more than one variant. This seems like a very weak argument. IMO (just based on the specs; haven't actually used it), the main reason to use this is for the PIO stuff. That's a very niche use case though.
...because that means there's a lot of support and documentation for that 1 variant and lots of people have solved problems and written about it, This is like the iPhone strategy against Nokia. When I worked at Nokia it produced many variant phones - each with a little more ram or a bit less or a better screen or a different chipset. This was because they thought that people bought on price and wanted to have a produ…
The lack of built-in flash kills it for me. STM32 M3s with comparable throughput are cheaper and don't require an external flash chip (example: STM32F103C8T6 for $1.20 from jlc). I love the generic PIO though, I really hope other manufacturers pick up on that.
> I love the generic PIO though, I really hope other manufacturers pick up on that. Unfortunately the Pi Foundation is seeking patents on the PIO architecture. I don't think they've been granted yet though.
I switched from ESP32 to the RP2040 because it's a much more reliable and documented device. My only concern right now with the RP2040 is that there are many ESP32 models with SPIRAM but it's not so simple to find a SPIRAM equipped RP2040 board. To be honest, given that the C development environment of the RP2040 is so good, you can make good use of the memory, but when one wants to develop a large MicroPython projec…
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
I switched from ESP32 to the RP2040 because it's a much more reliable and documented device. My only concern right now with the RP2040 is that there are many ESP32 models with SPIRAM but it's not so simple to find a SPIRAM equipped RP2040 board. To be honest, given that the C development environment of the RP2040 is so good, you can make good use of the memory, but when one wants to develop a large MicroPython projec…
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
If this RPi main chip costs $0.70, why does the finished product currently cost $93.00 (RPi 5)? They're quite expensive nowadays, I miss when you could purchase them for ~$30.00. Meanwhile, Expressif chips are literally everywhere and becoming ever more ubiquitous. Edit: Thanks friends for the correction. It is cool you can still buy an RPi Pico for $13.00 :)
If this RPi main chip costs $0.70, why does the finished product currently cost $93.00 (RPi 5)? They're quite expensive nowadays, I miss when you could purchase them for ~$30.00. Meanwhile, Expressif chips are literally everywhere and becoming ever more ubiquitous. Edit: Thanks friends for the correction. It is cool you can still buy an RPi Pico for $13.00 :)
The main chip in the Raspberry Pi Pico is the RP2040, which costs $4.
If this RPi main chip costs $0.70, why does the finished product currently cost $93.00 (RPi 5)? They're quite expensive nowadays, I miss when you could purchase them for ~$30.00. Meanwhile, Expressif chips are literally everywhere and becoming ever more ubiquitous. Edit: Thanks friends for the correction. It is cool you can still buy an RPi Pico for $13.00 :)
From Wifi/Bluetooth Antenna, LI Battery Controller, Ethernet whatever, Display or Camera Connector - You choose.
And then we have a multitude of even CPU choices and when running on a coin cell it makes a difference powering a second, unnecessary core or even wifi.
And with the C6 variants, Espressif even switches ISA again, from 8266, to ESP32 to a RISC-V based ISA.
So you are comparing the first of its kind SOC with a decade old Family of SBCs.