THE RASPBERRY Pi PICO
YOU NEED
The Raspberry Pi Pico arrived in early 2021 and saw the first Pi silicon device hit the market, the RP2040. The RP2040 system on chip (SoC) is an Arm Cortex M0+ dual-core at 133MHz (which can be easily overclocked), with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of onboard flash storage. This may not sound like a lot, but in the world of microcontrollers, it is plenty. The Pico has a 40-pin GPIO, just like the larger Raspberry Pi, but these pins are located around the perimeter of the board and make for easy insertion into a breadboard. The pins do not come presoldered and feature castellated edges. This means we can either solder male header pins to the board, or use the castellations to surface-mount solder the Pico to a circuit of our own design. The GPIO is easy to use via MicroPython, CircuitPython, JavaScript, C, Arduino and many other languages. The Pico also has the power to easily emulate ’80s-era home computers, such as the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Not bad for a £4 device.
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