Get Your Raspberry Pi Pico on DFRobot

DFRobot Jan 22 2021 1522

Now, you can buy your Raspberry Pi Pico at DFRobot online store! Link: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2187.html

What is Raspberry Pi Pico?

Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, fast, and versatile board built using RP2040, a brand new microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the UK, priced at just $4.

Raspberry Pi Pico has been designed to be a low cost yet flexible development platform for RP2040, with the following key features:

• RP2040 microcontroller with 2MByte Flash

• Micro-USB B port for power and data (and for reprogramming the Flash)

• 40 pins 21x51 'DIP' style 1mm thick PCB with 0.1" through-hole pins also with edge castellations

◦ Exposes 26 multi-function 3.3V General Purpose I/O (GPIO)

◦ 23 GPIO are digital-only and 3 are ADC capable

◦ Can be surface mounted as a module

• 3-pin ARM Serial Wire Debug (SWD) port

• Simple yet highly flexible power supply architecture

◦Various options for easily powering the unit from micro-USB, external supplies or batteries

• High quality, low cost, high availability

• Comprehensive SDK, software examples, and documentation

For full details of the RP2040 microcontroller please see the RP2040 Datasheet, however, the headline features are:

• Dual-core cortex M0+ at up to 133MHz

◦ On-chip PLL allows variable core frequency

• 264kByte multi-bank high-performance SRAM

• External Quad-SPI Flash with eXecute In Place (XIP)

• High-performance full-crossbar bus fabric

• On-board USB1.1 (device or host)

• 30 multi-function General Purpose IO (4 can be used for ADC)

◦ 1.8-3.3V IO Voltage (NOTE Pico IO voltage is fixed at 3.3V)

• 12-bit 500ksps Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC)

• Various digital peripherals

◦ 2 × UART, 2 × I2C, 2 × SPI, 16 × PWM channels

◦ 1 × Timer with 4 alarms, 1 × Real Time Counter

• 2 × Programmable IO (PIO) blocks, 8 state machines total

◦ Flexible, user-programmable high-speed IO

◦ Can emulate interfaces such as SD Card and VGA

Figure 1. Raspberry Pi Pico Board Overview

Pico provides minimal (yet flexible) external circuitry to support the RP2040 chip (Flash, crystal, power supplies and decoupling, and USB connector). The majority of the RP2040 microcontroller pins are brought to the user IO pins on the left and right edge of the board. Four RP2040 IO are used for internal functions - driving an LED, on-board Switched Mode Power Supply (SMPS) power control, and sensing the system voltages.

Pico has been designed to use either soldered 0.1" pin-headers (it is one 0.1" pitch wider than a standard 40-pin DIPpackage) or can be used as a surface-mountable 'module', as the user IO pins are also castellated. There are SMT pads underneath the USB connector and BOOTSEL button, which allow these signals to be accessed if used as a reflow soldered SMT module.