Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
1–10 of 11 posts
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#2Plug: we have designed a range of RP2040 based dev boards for different tasks which make prototyping/evaluating the platform a breeze - and it's an exciting platform with what it offers for the price. The PIO especially is an extremely interesting feature.
- Tiny2040 - a super small USB-C dev board with up to 8MB flash: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tiny-2040
- PicoSystem - a handheld gaming console with 240x240 colour IPS display, audio, and classic controls: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/picosystem
- Keybow2040 - a 16 key macro keypad with per-key RGB lighting: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/keybow-2040
- Plasma2040 - designed for driving WS2812/APA102 LED strips: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/plasma-2040
- Interstate 75 - for driving LED matrices like those used in giant outdoor screens: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/interstate-75
We also have a heap of accessories for the official Raspberry Pi Pico development board: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#3I haven’t come across an RP2040 I couldn’t overclock to 250+ MHz. Couple that with DMA into the PIO state machines and it smashes through stuff like the weird WS281X timings, HUB75 matrix scanning and even DVI and usually has a whole spare CPU core to actually do something with whatever device you’re driving.
It feels like it sits nicely between regular MCUs and the quirky every-peripheral-is-emulated-in-a-core awesomeness of the Parallax Propeller and - though I’m probably biased by experience and necessity - I love it.
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#4I haven’t come across an RP2040 I couldn’t overclock to 250+ MHz. Couple that with DMA into the PIO state machines and it smashes through stuff like the weird WS281X timings, HUB75 matrix scanning and even DVI and usually has a whole spare CPU core to actually do something with whatever device you’re driving. It feels like it sits nicely between regular MCUs and the quirky every-peripheral-is-emulated-in-a-core aweso…
I honestly loving using it as well, hence the post. I have not always had the best time with the Parallax Propeller (was going to use it for a work project last week but ended up going a different route) but when I have played with it the experience was awesome.
The RP2040 usually just works for me, and the PIO is awesome. I've had a few cool automation projects at home that the RP2040 was the easiest thing to just get up and running with. In the past I would've gone with something in the STM family, but I'm very happy and impressed with the RP2040/Pi Pico.
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#5Plug: we have designed a range of RP2040 based dev boards for different tasks which make prototyping/evaluating the platform a breeze - and it's an exciting platform with what it offers for the price. The PIO especially is an extremely interesting feature. - Tiny2040 - a super small USB-C dev board with up to 8MB flash: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tiny-2040 - PicoSystem - a handheld gaming console with 240x240…
I already love a lot of things at Pimoroni, but that Tiny2040 looks great for experimenting with! The wireless pack also seems interesting, might experiment with that concept on a custom board.
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#6I've been toying with porting a tiny subset of Unix to the Raspberry Pico ever since I bought a pair of these cute little buggers. But memory at 264KB remains an issue. How easy is it to wire up SPI to some external RAM chips maybe on a breadboard?
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#7I've been toying with porting a tiny subset of Unix to the Raspberry Pico ever since I bought a pair of these cute little buggers. But memory at 264KB remains an issue. How easy is it to wire up SPI to some external RAM chips maybe on a breadboard?
Yeah you won't even be able to decompress the kernel, you'll need at least a few MB of RAM (and even that would be heroic). Google SPI SRAM, pretty easy to use.
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#8I've been toying with porting a tiny subset of Unix to the Raspberry Pico ever since I bought a pair of these cute little buggers. But memory at 264KB remains an issue. How easy is it to wire up SPI to some external RAM chips maybe on a breadboard?
There’s no support for mapping external memory but you can apparently get creative: https://github.com/yocto-8/yocto-8/blob/main/doc/extmem.md
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#9I am an embedded developer and have used a lot of different microcontrollers in the past and present. The RP2xxx series is a very exciting microcontroller series. Currently only the RP2040 exists, but I expect to see other versions with more ram, integrated flash, maybe a M4 instead of M0+ core.
The truely exciting things about the RP2040 are:
- Market availability
- Low price
- 2 x Cortex M0+ cores
- Possibility to overclock
- Flexible PIO Programmable State Machines with FIFOs
- High GPIO count
- Excellent documentation (!)
- Lots of examples
I think the RP2040 is even totally overpowered / underutilized for most of the tasks I see in most projects.
What I would love to see in the future, is a version with integrated flash (with possibility to expand with external QSPI flash), a cortex M4 core with FPU and the ability to attach PSRAM to expand the usable memory (and map it into the memory map of the RP2xxx).
Re: Who Needs a Raspberry Pi Microcontroller Chip? Maybe You
#10I've been toying with porting a tiny subset of Unix to the Raspberry Pico ever since I bought a pair of these cute little buggers. But memory at 264KB remains an issue. How easy is it to wire up SPI to some external RAM chips maybe on a breadboard?
Yeah you won't even be able to decompress the kernel, you'll need at least a few MB of RAM (and even that would be heroic). Google SPI SRAM, pretty easy to use.
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