A Chip Is Born: RP2040-Based mostly Boards Go From 0 to 60+ With Spectacular Velocity

The microcontroller market — the place chips designed for real-time embedded use are positioned into growth boards usually known as “microcontrollers” themselves — is never shaken up. If you need one thing pleasant to newcomers, you decide an Arduino with a Microchip ATmega328; if you would like connectivity, an Espressif ESP32-based board; for efficiency, STMicro’s STM32 sequence.

The Raspberry Pi Pico, a $4 growth board with a robust, customized dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and versatile programmable enter/ output (PIO) blocks, shook issues up with its launch this 12 months — nevertheless it was the information that these new RP2040 chips could be offered individually at simply $1 every that brought on the largest aftershocks.

Accompanying the Pico’s launch, a variety of producers launched boards based mostly on the RP2040: Adafruit, Arduino, Pimoroni, and SparkFun to start out. Within the months since, practically 70 bulletins have adopted with designs spanning the gamut from domain-specific devices just like the Raspberry Fish synth from TINRS to general-purpose tinkering boards like Invector Labs’ Challenger RP2040.

“We’re fairly pleased with how issues are going,” Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton advised us. “Numerous enthusiasm for the neighborhood as individuals actually begin to perceive what the chip can do. We’re nonetheless on observe to clear our Pico backlog, and get RP2040 into high-volume, over 1 million unit availability earlier than the top of the 12 months.”

Adafruit’s Limor Fried amplifies the thrill, saying “It’s among the finest issues to ever occur for electronics.”

At time of writing, we’ve recognized over 60 distinct boards that make the most of this new chip, with extra coming repeatedly.

We discovered extra RP2040 boards on Twitter: