CUSTOMISATION / HOBBY TECH
REVIEW
Raspberry Pi Pico
T
he Raspberry Pi family of single-
board computers has been a story
of success, and in its current form
spans the market from the ultra-low-cost
Raspberry Pi Zero to the high-performance
Raspberry Pi 4, as well as the recently
launched Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for
the embedded crowd. However, the
Raspberry Pi Pico is not a new Raspberry Pi.
It’s a new board from Raspberry Pi, yes,
but it’s not a single-board computer – for
all that it computes, and its electronics fit
on a single board. It’s a microcontroller
development board, marking Raspberry
Pi’s desire to replicate its success in the
single-board computer market in the world
of microcontrollers.
The Raspberry Pi Pico isn’t just the first
microcontroller board to come out of
Raspberry Pi in Cambridge either. It also
houses the company’s first in-house silicon,
RP2040. The first in a likely family of chips,
RP2040 is a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+
microcontroller running at 133MHz with
256KB of static RAM (SRAM), plus 2MB of
external flash. The chip is both designed and
taped-out by Raspberry Pi’s own Application
Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) team, in a first
for the company.
The fact that Raspberry Pi has the talent
to do in-house chip design should come as
no surprise – many of the company’s staff,
including co-founder Eben Upton, came from
silicon giant Broadcom. It’s also logical that this
move has begun with a microcontroller usingArm IP, despite Raspberry Pi having recently
expressed interest in the free and open-
source RISC-V instruction set architecture.
The company has been using Arm chips
since launch, and is intimately familiar with
the technology.
Still, the launch of the Raspberry Pi Pico
and RP2040 brings a few surprises with it.
The first is that the board design of the Pico
is open source, unlike the Raspberry Pi SBC
range, although the internal machinations of
the RP2040 are being kept a closed secret.
The second is that it straddles two markets:
education and hobbyist at one side; industrial
and embedded at the other.
A look at the Pico board, fresh from the
package, reveals two notable areas. Firstly,
the 2.45mm pin headers are unpopulated,
meaning that the first step will be soldering
pins into place – a relatively beginner-hostile
move, and one that retailers are likely to fix by
offering versions with pre-soldered headers,
much like the Raspberry PI Zero H.
Secondly, the headers are also castellated,
with indents along the outer edge. The reasonThe smallest Raspberry Pi yet, the Pico
is a microcontroller with in-house siliconThe RP2040 is not only the first
microcontroller from Raspberry Pi, but
also the company’s first in-house siliconLanguages available at launch include C/C++, TensorFlow Lite,
MicroPython and CircuitPython, with an Arduino core on the way