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Raspberry Pi Pico Announced As $4 Microcontroller

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  • #31
    Not to knock a brand new project, but considering that the Raspberry Pi foundation is a member of the RISC-V foundation, this seem like a missed opportunity. If this silicon was designed by Raspberry Pi engineers in-house, why didn't they base it on the RISC-V architecture? It's a low-power microcontroller without much complexity in it, so it would have been an ideal first project for them to gain RISC-V experience with.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by SteamPunker View Post
      Not to knock a brand new project, but considering that the Raspberry Pi foundation is a member of the RISC-V foundation, this seem like a missed opportunity. If this silicon was designed by Raspberry Pi engineers in-house, why didn't they base it on the RISC-V architecture? It's a low-power microcontroller without much complexity in it, so it would have been an ideal first project for them to gain RISC-V experience with.
      Seems like a work-in-progress:

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      • #33
        Originally posted by extremesquared View Post
        Inreresting. Thanks for sharing.

        However, as promising as that Picorio initiative looks, the chip behind this new Raspberry Pi microcontroller was developed by Raspberry Pi developers in-house, separately from joint industry initiatives such as Picorio. So if they were going to develop new silicon independently from Broadcom anyway, why didn't they base it on RISC-V? That was more my point.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by SteamPunker View Post

          Inreresting. Thanks for sharing.

          However, as promising as that Picorio initiative looks, the chip behind this new Raspberry Pi microcontroller was developed by Raspberry Pi developers in-house, separately from joint industry initiatives such as Picorio. So if they were going to develop new silicon independently from Broadcom anyway, why didn't they base it on RISC-V? That was more my point.
          I suspect it is simply because they started the design before RISC-V arch was sufficiently mature to use and, as with any tech development, you can either finish what you started, or keep changing to the latest new-hotness until the pending heat-death of the universe becomes a legitimate design limitation!

          Having said that, yes, I too am disappointed that it couldn't be a RISC-V device. Though I am still on the fence re: RISC-V vs OpenPower vs ARM64, I am sitting on that fence-post facing RISC-V's way as there seem to be less things I dislike about the architectural decisions that went into RISC-V than in the other platforms.

          Meanwhile I will just have to be content to play with my Sipeed Longan Nano RISC-V GD32VF103CBT6 Development Boards (https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-L...rd-p-4725.html) and dream of the nifty IO features and AAA+ documentation of the Pi-Pico (which is the real meat anyway - the flavor of CPU core is not really the important bit of any system these days, from an off-the-shelf utility perspective).
          Last edited by Viki Ai; 24 January 2021, 04:18 PM.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by Stupido View Post
            (embedded engineer here)
            Wow, you must be the tiniest person ever!

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            • #36
              Originally posted by chocolate View Post

              Wow, you must be the tiniest person ever!
              🤣 yeap... ~115 kilos... 😁

              (no worries, I got the insult... )

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              • #37
                Originally posted by Danielsan View Post
                Which may be the recommended age to approach a kid to this matter? This PICO looks more focus in doing stuff rather than a RPI which resemble more a true computer... Don't know, just I love those stuff as much as I do not understand them at all...
                As with anything else, it obviously must depend on the kid! I've got a 5 year old I'm starting onto this kind of thing, obviously not solo programming, but thinking of ideas that I turn into code and explaining what it does.

                However, my recommendation is this; if you want to introduce a kid to programming on microcontrollers, make sure that the chip is supported by something sane, like Zephyr, and not just by that horrid arduino crap. This chip "could" be supported by Zephyr, since it meets the requirements, however I don't see any obvious signs of anyone actually working on it. Until I see that, this chip is firmly in the "no way" column. The usual suspects are supported well by Zephyr; Microchip/Atmel SAM, Nordic NRF, etc. To be honest, I don't see much of a market for this rpi mcu, the market is already saturated with better chips that are priced similarly.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by droidhacker View Post

                  As with anything else, it obviously must depend on the kid! I've got a 5 year old I'm starting onto this kind of thing, obviously not solo programming, but thinking of ideas that I turn into code and explaining what it does.

                  However, my recommendation is this; if you want to introduce a kid to programming on microcontrollers, make sure that the chip is supported by something sane, like Zephyr, and not just by that horrid arduino crap. This chip "could" be supported by Zephyr, since it meets the requirements, however I don't see any obvious signs of anyone actually working on it. Until I see that, this chip is firmly in the "no way" column. The usual suspects are supported well by Zephyr; Microchip/Atmel SAM, Nordic NRF, etc. To be honest, I don't see much of a market for this rpi mcu, the market is already saturated with better chips that are priced similarly.
                  The only thing I like about the Raspberry PI products is those have the best documentation and the best distro support out there, I have and had several boards but only the PIs have the best Linux mainstream support, all the other are handled by a community effort mostly base on one individual force... Also the documentation is important I do not anything about coding, soldering etc... Maybe the other solutions are better but do not put the same effort in the documentations, tutorials, projects as the PI does or has...

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