The RP2040 (right) was newly developed at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the Pi Pico builds on it as a standalone board option for embedded development or as a companion piece to a Raspberry Pi computer.
Arduino
Arduino is also keen to use the Raspberry Pi silicon.
Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante (the company’s co-founder & chairman and CEO, respectively) have announced that Eben Upton and the Pi team had shared their plans. And they’ve welcomed the chance to build their own Arduino-shaped offering on the RP2020, the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.
They write:
‘Raspberry and chips,’ not something you’d like to eat but in the world of silicon it’s actually a great combination. Eben Upton recently shared with us Raspberry Pi’s exciting vision for a revolutionary product that they were working on: a microcontroller, the RP2040, based on Raspberry Pi silicon.
The news was both disruptive and exciting at the same time. At Arduino, we love to put our hands on innovative technologies, micros, sensors and all the building blocks that allow us to fulfil our mission of making technology simple to use for everyone. The curiosity was growing and a few weeks later we were already tinkering with the initial development tools. The processor is a very intriguing beast – it’s a dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller with fairly sophisticated architecture.
They explain that they worked with the tiny footprint of the Nano format, keeping features such the versatile u-blox NINA WiFi and Bluetooth module.
But they promise the new board will also feature high-quality MEMS sensors from STM (a 9-axis IMU and a microphone), 16MB of flash memory (to provide space for code, data storage and over-the-air updates, and that its architecture will be enable people to use the RP2040 chip with the Arduino ecosystem (IDE, command line tool, libraries, etc).
The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect will be available for pre-order “in the next few weeks”.
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