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Meet Raspberry Silicon: Raspberry Pi Pico now on sale at $4

Post Syndicated from original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/

Today, we’re launching our first microcontroller-class product: Raspberry Pi Pico. Priced at just $4, it is built on RP2040, a brand-new chip developed right here at Raspberry Pi. Whether you’re looking for a standalone board for deep-embedded development or a companion to your Raspberry Pi computer, or you’re taking your first steps with a microcontroller, this is the board for you.

You can buy your Raspberry Pi Pico today online from one of our Approved Resellers. Or head to your local newsagent, where every copy of this month’s HackSpace magazine comes with a free Pico, as well as plenty of guides and tutorials to help you get started with it. If coronavirus restrictions mean that you can’t get to your newsagent right now, you can grab a subscription and get Pico delivered to your door.

Oops!… We Did It Again

Microcomputers and microcontrollers

Many of our favourite projects, from cucumber sorters to high altitude balloons, connect Raspberry Pi to the physical world: software running on the Raspberry Pi reads sensors, performs computations, talks to the network, and drives actuators. This ability to bridge the worlds of software and hardware has contributed to the enduring popularity of Raspberry Pi computers, with over 37 million units sold to date.

But there are limits: even in its lowest power mode a Raspberry Pi Zero will consume on the order of 100 milliwatts; Raspberry Pi on its own does not support analogue input; and while it is possible to run “bare metal” software on a Raspberry Pi, software running under a general-purpose operating system like Linux is not well suited to low-latency control of individual I/O pins.

Many hobbyist and industrial applications pair a Raspberry Pi with a microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi takes care of heavyweight computation, network access, and storage, while the microcontroller handles analogue input and low-latency I/O and, sometimes, provides a very low-power standby mode.

Until now, we’ve not been able to figure out a way to make a compelling microcontroller-class product of our own. To make the product we really wanted to make, first we had to learn to make our own chips.

Raspberry Si

It seems like every fruit company is making its own silicon these days, and we’re no exception. RP2040 builds on the lessons we’ve learned from using other microcontrollers in our products, from the Sense HAT to Raspberry Pi 400. It’s the result of many years of hard work by our in-house chip team.

RP2040 on a Raspberry Pi Pico

We had three principal design goals for RP2040: high performance, particularly for integer workloads; flexible I/O, to allow us to talk to almost any external device; and of course, low cost, to eliminate barriers to entry. We ended up with an incredibly powerful little chip, cramming all this into a 7 × 7 mm QFN-56 package containing just two square millimetres of 40 nm silicon. RP2040 has:

  • Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
  • 264KB (remember kilobytes?) of on-chip RAM
  • Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
  • DMA controller
  • Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
  • 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
  • 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers
  • 16 × PWM channels
  • 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
  • 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
  • USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming

And this isn’t just a powerful chip: it’s designed to help you bring every last drop of that power to bear. With six independent banks of RAM, and a fully connected switch at the heart of its bus fabric, you can easily arrange for the cores and DMA engines to run in parallel without contention.

For power users, we provide a complete C SDK, a GCC-based toolchain, and Visual Studio Code integration.

As Cortex-M0+ lacks a floating-point unit, we have commissioned optimised floating-point functions from Mark Owen, author of the popular Qfplib libraries; these are substantially faster than their GCC library equivalents, and are licensed for use on any RP2040-based product.

With two fast cores and and a large amount of on-chip RAM, RP2040 is a great platform for machine learning applications. You can find Pete Warden’s port of Google’s TensorFlow Lite framework here. Look out for more machine learning content over the coming months.

For beginners, and other users who prefer high-level languages, we’ve worked with Damien George, creator of MicroPython, to build a polished port for RP2040; it exposes all of the chip’s hardware features, including our innovative PIO subsystem. And our friend Aivar Annamaa has added RP2040 MicroPython support to the popular Thonny IDE.

Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico is designed as our low-cost breakout board for RP2040. It pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash memory, and a power supply chip supporting input voltages from 1.8-5.5V. This allows you to power your Pico from a wide variety of sources, including two or three AA cells in series, or a single lithium-ion cell.

Pico provides a single push button, which can be used to enter USB mass-storage mode at boot time and also as a general input, and a single LED. It exposes 26 of the 30 GPIO pins on RP2040, including three of the four analogue inputs, to 0.1”-pitch pads; you can solder headers to these pads or take advantage of their castellated edges to solder Pico directly to a carrier board. Volume customers will be able to buy pre-reeled Pico units: in fact we already supply Pico to our Approved Resellers in this format.

The Pico PCB layout was co-designed with the RP2040 silicon and package, and we’re really pleased with how it turned out: a two-layer PCB with a solid ground plane and a GPIO breakout that “just works”.

A reel of Raspberry Pi Pico boards
Reely good

Whether Raspberry Pi Pico is your first microcontroller or your fifty-first, we can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Raspberry Pi Pico documentation

Our ambition with RP2040 wasn’t just to produce the best chip, but to support that chip with the best documentation. Alasdair Allan, who joined us a year ago, has overseen a colossal effort on the part of the whole engineering team to document every aspect of the design, with simple, easy-to-understand examples to help you get the most out of your Raspberry Pi Pico.

You can find complete documentation for Raspberry Pi Pico, and for RP2040, its SDK and toolchain, here.

Get Started with Raspberry Pi Pico book

To help you get the most of your Pico, why not grab a copy of Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico by Gareth Halfacree and our very own Ben Everard. It’s ideal for beginners who are new (or new-ish) to making with microcontrollers.

Our colleagues at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have also produced an educational project to help you get started with Raspberry Pi Pico. You can find it here.

Partners

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working with our friends at Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, and Sparkfun to create accessories for Raspberry Pi Pico, and a variety of other boards built on the RP2040 silicon platform. Here are just a few of the products that are available to buy or pre-order today.

Adafruit Feather RP 2040

RP2040 joins the hundreds of boards in the Feather ecosystem with the fully featured Feather RP 2040 board. The 2″ × 0.9″ dev board has USB C, Lipoly battery charging, 4MB of QSPI flash memory, a STEMMA QT I2C connector, and an optional SWD debug port. With plenty of GPIO for use with any FeatherWing, and hundreds of Qwiic/QT/Grove sensors that can plug and play, it’s the fast way to get started.

Feathery goodness

Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP 2040

Need a petite dev board for RP2040? The Itsy Bitsy RP 2040 is positively tiny, but it still has lots of GPIO, 4MB of QSPI flash, boot and reset buttons, a built-in RGB NeoPixel, and even a 5V output logic pin, so it’s perfect for NeoPixel projects!

Small is beautiful

Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect

Arduino joins the RP2040 family with one of its most popular formats: the Arduino Nano. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect combines the power of RP2040 with high-quality MEMS sensors (a 9-axis IMU and microphone), a highly efficient power section, a powerful WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the ECC608 crypto chip, enabling anybody to create secure IoT applications with this new microcontroller. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect will be available for pre-order in the next few weeks.

Get connected!

Pimoroni PicoSystem

PicoSystem is a tiny and delightful handheld game-making experience based on RP2040. It comes with a simple and fast software library, plus examples to make your mini-gaming dreams happen. Or just plug it into USB and drop the best creations from the Raspberry Pi-verse straight onto the flash drive.

Pixel-pushing pocket-sized playtime

Pimoroni Pico Explorer Base

Pico Explorer offers an embedded electronics environment for educators, engineers, and software people who want to learn hardware with less of the “hard” bit. It offers easy expansion and breakout along with a whole bunch of useful bits.

Go explore!

SparkFun Thing Plus – RP2040

The Thing Plus – RP2040 is a low-cost, high-performance board with flexible digital interfaces featuring Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 microcontroller. Within the Feather-compatible Thing Plus form factor with 18 GPIO pins, the board offers an SD card slot, 16MB (128Mbit) flash memory, a JST single-cell battery connector (with a charging circuit and fuel gauge sensor), an addressable WS2812 RGB LED, JTAG PTH pins, mounting holes, and a Qwiic connector to add devices from SparkFun’s quick-connect I2C ecosystem.

Thing One, or Thing Two?

SparkFun MicroMod RP2040 Processor

The MicroMod RP2040 Processor Board is part of SparkFun’s MicroMod modular interface system. The MicroMod M.2 connector makes it easy to connect your RP2040 Processor Board with the MicroMod carrier board that gives you the inputs and outputs you need for your project.

The Mighty Micro

SparkFun Pro Micro – RP2040

The Pro Micro RP2040 harnesses the capability of RP2040 on a compact development board with the USB functionality that is the hallmark of all SparkFun’s Pro Micro boards. It has a WS2812B addressable LED, boot button, reset button, Qwiic connector, USB-C, and castellated pads.

Go Pro

Credits

It’s fair to say we’ve taken the long road to creating Raspberry Pi Pico. Chip development is a complicated business, drawing on the talents of many different people. Here’s an incomplete list of those who have contributed to the RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico projects:

Dave Akerman, Sam Alder, Alasdair Allan, Aivar Annamaa, Jonathan Bell, Mike Buffham, Dom Cobley, Steve Cook, Phil Daniell, Russell Davis, Phil Elwell, Ben Everard, Andras Ferencz, Nick Francis, Liam Fraser, Damien George, Richard Gordon, F Trevor Gowen, Gareth Halfacree, David Henly, Kevin Hill, Nick Hollinghurst, Gordon Hollingworth, James Hughes, Tammy Julyan, Jason Julyan, Phil King, Stijn Kuipers, Lestin Liu, Simon Long, Roy Longbottom, Ian Macaulay, Terry Mackown, Jon Matthews, Nellie McKesson, Rod Oldfield, Mark Owen, Mike Parker, David Plowman, Dominic Plunkett, Graham Sanderson, Andrew Scheller, Serge Schneider, Nathan Seidle, Vinaya Puthur Sekar, Mark Sherlock, Martin Sperl, Mike Stimson, Ha Thach, Roger Thornton, Jonathan Welch, Simon West, Jack Willis, Luke Wren, David Wright.

We’d also like to thank our friends at Sony Pencoed and Sony Inazawa, Microtest, and IMEC for their help in bringing these projects to fruition.

Buy your Raspberry Pi Pico from one of our Approved Resellers today, and let us know what you think!

FAQs

Are you planning to make RP2040 available to customers?

We hope to make RP2040 broadly available in the second quarter of 2021.

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Raspberry Pi 400: the $70 desktop PC

Post Syndicated from original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-400-the-70-desktop-pc/

Raspberry Pi has always been a PC company. Inspired by the home computers of the 1980s, our mission is to put affordable, high-performance, programmable computers into the hands of people all over the world. And inspired by these classic PCs, here is Raspberry Pi 400: a complete personal computer, built into a compact keyboard.

Raspberry Pi 4, which we launched in June last year, is roughly forty times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi, and offers an experience that is indistinguishable from a legacy PC for the majority of users. Particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen a rapid increase in the use of Raspberry Pi 4 for home working and studying.

A front view of the Raspberry Pi keyboard

But user friendliness is about more than performance: it can also be about form factor. In particular, having fewer objects on your desk makes for a simpler set-up experience. Classic home computers – BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Commodore Amigas, and the rest – integrated the motherboard directly into the keyboard. No separate system unit and case; no keyboard cable. Just a computer, a power supply, a monitor cable, and (sometimes) a mouse.

Raspberry Pi 400

We’ve never been shy about borrowing a good idea. Which brings us to Raspberry Pi 400: it’s a faster, cooler 4GB Raspberry Pi 4, integrated into a compact keyboard. Priced at just $70 for the computer on its own, or $100 for a ready-to-go kit, if you’re looking for an affordable PC for day-to-day use this is the Raspberry Pi for you.

Buy the kit

The Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit is the “Christmas morning” product, with the best possible out-of-box experience: a complete PC which plugs into your TV or monitor. The kit comprises:

  • A Raspberry Pi 400 computer
  • Our official USB mouse
  • Our official USB-C power supply
  • An SD card with Raspberry Pi OS pre-installed
  • A micro HDMI to HDMI cable
  • The official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide

At launch, we are supporting English (UK and US), French, Italian, German, and Spanish keyboard layouts, with (for the first time) translated versions of the Beginner’s Guide. In the near future, we plan to support the same set of languages as our official keyboard.

Buy the computer

Saving money by bringing your own peripherals has always been part of the Raspberry Pi ethos. If you already have the other bits of the kit, you can buy a Raspberry Pi 400 computer on its own for just $70.

A close up of the left-hand keys of the Raspberry Pi 400

Buy the book

To accompany Raspberry Pi 400, we’ve released a fourth edition of our popular Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, packed with updated material to help you get the most out of your new PC.

You can buy a copy of the Beginner’s Guide today from the Raspberry Pi Press store, or download a free PDF.

Where to buy Raspberry Pi 400

UK, US, and French Raspberry Pi 400 kits and computers are available to buy right now. Italian, German, and Spanish units are on their way to Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers, who should have them in stock in the next week.

We expect that Approved Resellers in India, Australia, and New Zealand will have kits and computers in stock by the end of the year. We’re rapidly rolling out compliance certification for other territories too, so that Raspberry Pi 400 will be available around the world in the first few months of 2021.

Of course, if you’re anywhere near Cambridge, you can head over to the Raspberry Pi Store to pick up your Raspberry Pi 400 today.

What does everyone else think?

We let a handful of people take an early look at Raspberry Pi 400 so they could try it out and pull together their thoughts to share with you. Here’s what some of them made of it.

Simon Martin, who has spent the last couple of years bringing Raspberry Pi 400 to life, will be here tomorrow to share some of the interesting technical challenges that he encountered along the way. In the meantime, start thinking about what you’ll do with your Raspberry Pi PC.

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Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 on sale now from $25

Post Syndicated from original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4/

It’s become a tradition that we follow each Raspberry Pi model with a system-on-module variant based on the same core silicon. Raspberry Pi 1 gave rise to the original Compute Module in 2014; Raspberry Pi 3 and 3+ were followed by Compute Module 3 and 3+ in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Only Raspberry Pi 2, our shortest-lived flagship product at just thirteen months, escaped the Compute Module treatment.

It’s been sixteen months since we unleashed Raspberry Pi 4 on the world, and today we’re announcing the launch of Compute Module 4, starting from $25.

Over half of the seven million Raspberry Pi units we sell each year go into industrial and commercial applications, from digital signage to thin clients to process automation. Many of these applications use the familiar single-board Raspberry Pi, but for users who want a more compact or custom form factor, or on-board eMMC storage, Compute Module products provide a simple way to move from a Raspberry Pi-based prototype to volume production.

A step change in performance

Built on the same 64-bit quad-core BCM2711 application processor as Raspberry Pi 4, our Compute Module 4 delivers a step change in performance over its predecessors: faster CPU cores, better multimedia, more interfacing capabilities, and, for the first time, a choice of RAM densities and a wireless connectivity option.

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

You can find detailed specs here, but let’s run through the highlights:

  • 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU
  • VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x
  • 4Kp60 hardware decode of H.265 (HEVC) video
  • 1080p60 hardware decode, and 1080p30 hardware encode of H.264 (AVC) video
  • Dual HDMI interfaces, at resolutions up to 4K
  • Single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface
  • Dual MIPI DSI display, and dual MIPI CSI-2 camera interfaces
  • 1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM
  • Optional 8GB, 16GB or 32GB eMMC Flash storage
  • Optional 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 5.0
  • Gigabit Ethernet PHY with IEEE 1588 support
  • 28 GPIO pins, with up to 6 × UART, 6 × I2C and 5 × SPI
Compute Module 4 Lite (without eMMC Flash memory)
Compute Module 4 Lite, our variant without eMMC Flash memory

New, more compact form factor

Compute Module 4 introduces a brand new form factor, and a compatibility break with earlier Compute Modules. Where previous modules adopted the JEDEC DDR2 SODIMM mechanical standard, with I/O signals on an edge connector, we now bring I/O signals to two high-density perpendicular connectors (one for power and low-speed interfaces, and one for high-speed interfaces).

This significantly reduces the overall footprint of the module on its carrier board, letting you achieve smaller form factors for your products.

High-density connector on board underside
High-density connector on board underside

32 variants

With four RAM options, four Flash options, and optional wireless connectivity, we have a total of 32 variants, with prices ranging from $25 (for the 1GB RAM, Lite, no wireless variant) to $90 (for the 8GB RAM, 32GB Flash, wireless variant).

We’re very pleased that the four variants with 1GB RAM and no wireless keep the same price points ($25, $30, $35, and $40) as their Compute Module 3+ equivalents: once again, we’ve managed to pack a lot more performance into the platform without increasing the price.

You can find the full price list in the Compute Module 4 product brief.

Compute Module 4 IO Board

To help you get started with Compute Module 4, we are also launching an updated IO Board. Like the IO boards for earlier Compute Module products, this breaks out all the interfaces from the Compute Module to standard connectors, providing a ready-made development platform and a starting point for your own designs.

Compute Module 4 IO Board
Compute Module 4 IO Board

The IO board provides:

  • Two full-size HDMI ports
  • Gigabit Ethernet jack
  • Two USB 2.0 ports
  • MicroSD card socket (only for use with Lite, no-eMMC Compute Module 4 variants)
  • PCI Express Gen 2 x1 socket
  • HAT footprint with 40-pin GPIO connector and PoE header
  • 12V input via barrel jack (supports up to 26V if PCIe unused)
  • Camera and display FPC connectors
  • Real-time clock with battery backup

CAD for the IO board is available in KiCad format. You may recall that a few years ago we made a donation to support improvements to KiCad’s differential pair routing and track length control features; now you can use this feature-rich, open-source PCB layout package to design your own Compute Module carrier board.

Compute Module 4 mounted on the IO Board
Compute Module 4 mounted on the IO Board

In addition to serving as a development platform and reference design, we expect the IO board to be a finished product in its own right: if you require a Raspberry Pi that supports a wider range of input voltages, has all its major connectors in a single plane, or allows you to attach your own PCI Express devices, then Compute Module 4 with the IO Board does what you need.

We’ve set the price of the bare IO board at just $35, so a complete package including a Compute Module starts from $60.

Compute Module 4 Antenna Kit

We expect that most users of wireless Compute Module variants will be happy with the on-board PCB antenna. However, in some circumstances – for example, where the product is in a metal case, or where it is not possible to provide the necessary ground plane cut-out under the module – an external antenna will be required. The Compute Module 4 Antenna Kit comprises a whip antenna, with a bulkhead screw fixture and U.FL connector to attach to the socket on the module.

Antenna Kit and Compute Module 4
Antenna Kit and Compute Module 4

When using ether the Antenna Kit or the on-board antenna, you can take advantage of our modular certification to reduce the conformance testing costs for your finished product. And remember, the Raspberry Pi Integrator Programme is there to help you get your Compute Module-based product to market.

Our most powerful Compute Module

This is our best Compute Module yet. It’s also our first product designed by Dominic Plunkett, who joined us almost exactly a year ago.

I sat down with Dominic last week to discuss Compute Module 4 in greater detail, and you can find the video of our conversation here. Dominic will also be sharing more technical detail in the blog tomorrow.

In the meantime, check out the Compute Module 4 page for the datasheet and other details, and start thinking about what you’ll build with Compute Module 4.

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