The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny $4 microcontroller running off the company’s very own chip
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is designing its own chips
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Image: Raspberry Pi Foundation
The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s tiny computers can be used for anything from homemade cameras to cucumber sorters, and now, the group is branching out into microcontrollers and custom silicon. The Raspberry Pi Pico is the first step. It’s a new $4 microcontroller that’s smaller than the average Pi, features a custom chip powerful enough to be used in machine learning projects (according to The Raspberry Pi Foundation), and is on sale now.
Arduino, and Pi Pico, builds on the Raspberry Pi RP2040
Not only has Raspberry Pi launched its first microcontroller-class product – the RP2040, used by the Raspberry Pi Pico – but then Arduino have built on it with the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.
The RP2040 is newly developed at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the Pi Pico builds on it (see above) as a standalone board option for embedded development or as companion piece to your Raspberry Pi computer, perhaps serving first steps with a microcontroller.
Basically, we are talking about interfacing your Raspberry Pi to the outside “real” world, whether it is reading sensors, connecting to networks or driving actuators.