Raspberry Pi Pico | $4 microcontroller board
Raspberry Pi just launched something completely different from previous products. For the first time, the tech company has created a microcontroller with its own designed chip just for $4 dollars!
The Raspberry Pico has an RP240 dual-core ARM cortex microprocessor. Furthermore, the microcontroller has a 133MHz clock! If we compare it with an Arduino Uno, one of the most popular microcontrollers for electronic projects, it has a clock speed of 16MHz. In other words, the Raspberry Pico can complete a processing cycle eight times faster than an Arduino Uno. It also has 264KB of RAM and 2MB onboard QSPI Flash.
It has a size of 21 by 51 mm, and the board counts with 26 GPIO pins, 3 of which are for analog signals. The microcontroller can handle voltages from 1.8 to 5V, although the GPIO pins work with 3.3V logic levels. In addition to all these characteristics, the Raspberry Pico includes one temperature sensor onboard, which can be programmed using the Integrated Development Environment.
This microcontroller can be programmed with C, just like an Arduino or any development boards from Microchip, and with MicroPython, a Python compiler intended for microcontrollers. So, it does not matter if you prefer low-level or high-level languages; the Raspberry Pico can handle both.
With all these characteristics, the rivalry between Arduino and Raspberry Pi is closer than ever. But Arduino has innovated as well. Last year, Arduino launched its first microcontroller for high performance and industrial applications, the Arduino Portenta H7. We will see how Arduino reacts to the new Raspberry Pico. I am sure we will probably see a new microcontroller before the year ends.
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