New member of the Pi family. Looks rather useful

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

Posted 9 months ago

Oooh, I need to get them to add to my collection of Pi’s I have no specific use for but will one day…

Posted 9 months ago

ha! was literally just about to post this 😃

yeah, it looks great. I will pick a couple up next time I do an order from somewhere that sells them!

its competition is something like the Arduino Nano (it’s a microcontroller NOT a full linux computer like other Pis) but interestingly Arduino are working on both their version which uses this new RP2040 chip but also porting their Arduino IDE over to the new hardware. (Apparently their version will have bluetooth/wifi/accelerometer/mic etc which sounds really cool for robot stuff!)

great news for the educational sector as this can run MicroPython so brings some consistency (normally Pis would be programmed in Python but microcontrollers in C). Really looking forward to seeing what else they bring out based on the RP2040 and how they develop the platform!

Only about £3.60 too so about the same price or less than an Arduino Nano (unless you’re buying them in quantity direct from China) but significantly more powerful. Made by Sony in Japan also.

Posted 9 months ago

the new nano is going to be based on the pico.

Posted 9 months ago

Nice but without wifi it’s no use for me unfortunately as I want sensor data uploading to the internetz.
Cool though.

Posted 9 months ago

@sharkbait I’m sure they will be bringing out more devices based on this chip including ones with WiFi connectivity etc. As mentioned Arduino are already working on one, although looking at the price of genuine Arduino stuff I wouldn’t be surprised if it were actually quite expensive!

Also Pimoroni have already announced a WiFi add-on which has the same footprint.
(and a tiny dev-board based on the Raspberry SoC which is really embeddable!)

Posted 9 months ago

Oooh, I need to get them to add to my collection of Pi’s I have no specific use for but will one day…

I have a mark one in it’s original box somewhere, never used!

Posted 9 months ago

I’m sure they will be bringing out more devices based on this chip including ones with WiFi connectivity etc

That would be fun. I have about 8 pi mostly collecting temperature data (a couple then use that data to control heating systems) – it would be nice to reduce the size of the total package of some of these and make them portable and less reliant on “mains power”.

Posted 9 months ago

@Sharkbait if you don’t mind me asking; what are you using on the heating system side to control with? I’ve got several PiZero setup with temp/humidity sensors, plus python scripts into a database and analytics frontend (grafana) – a great learning experience but just collecting and displaying data rather than using it.

Posted 9 months ago

Ahh well nothing clever I’m afraid.
It’s set up in our house by the beach that only has electric heating. So I set a target temperature, the script creates a float point (half a degree less than the target) and the pi switches wireless heaters on and off as required.
Incredibly basic and very effective!

Posted 9 months ago