Original Raspberry Pi Pico Computer Development Board

Raspberry Pi Foundation is well known for its series of single-board computers (Raspberry Pi series). But in January 2021 they launched their first micro-controller class product know as Raspberry Pi Pico. It is built around the RP2040 Soc, a very fast but yet cost-effective microcontroller chip packed with a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. M0+ is one of the most power-efficient ARM processors.

Raspberry Pi PICO board

Raspberry Pi Pico is a small, fast, and versatile board that at its heart consists of RP2040, a brand-new product launched by Raspberry Foundation in the UK. It can be programmed using Micro Python or C language.

RP2040 Microcontroller: Heart of Raspberry pi Pico

Introduction to Raspberry Pi PICO

• RP2040 is a custom-designed processor chip by the Raspberry Pi foundation itself.
• It is a powerful but cost-effective processor, featuring a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor running at 133Mhz.
• Has 264KB of internal RAM and support for up to 16MB of onboard flash memory.
• A wide range of flexible I/O operations is possible including I2C, SPI, and Programmable general purpose I/O (GPIO).

Why R-Pi foundation named the microcontroller RP2040?

The name of the RP2040 microcontroller is made up of 5 sections:

• RP in RP2040 means ‘Raspberry Pi’.
• 2 signifies the number of processor cores the microcontroller has i.e, 2 cores.
• 0 represents the type of processor core the RP2040 microcontroller has. This processor is called ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. Other microcontrollers of this series by ARM are named as Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7 etc.
• 4 means the microcontroller has has 264 kilobytes (kB) of RAM. Which is based on a special mathematical function: floor(log2(RAM/16)).
• 0 simply means there is no non-volatile storage on‑board.