RasPi 3: Raspberry Pi Pico Apps
Last Updated on March 31, 2021
I bought a pico, and hold repos,
Kenta Ishii's Projects on Raspberry Pi Pico. I assume no pull request, and the repo name is absolutely absolutism. I'm working to make applications for entertainments, such as musical performance. The pico is just a long-awaited product. I list reasons as below.
1. Open Hardware and Open Source
BCM chips on other Pis are partially opened. For example, these chips support an optimization for video streaming in the hardware level, however the actual mechanism hasn't been opened, and only binaries to run the machine is supplied. I should say BCM chips are even convenient to use with Linux-based OS which implements the binaries for the multi-media machine. However, in public, these chips don't tell about a USB unit, and a boot CPU. In contrast, RP2040 for Raspberry Pi is just fully opened on hardware, software, and even firmware to boot.
2. Single-board Microcontroller with Good Performance
Arduino is the popular single-board microcontroller for years. The chip for Arduino is the series of Atmel AVR. AVR is 16-bit; basically, the data of AVR is 8-bit, however the length of instructions is 16-bit and AVR can handle 16-bit data by connecting a pair of registers. RP2040 includes ARM Cortex-M0+ which is 32-bit. Note that in the current industrial scene, new Cortex-M23 is used for the low-energy microcontoller. Cortex-M0+ doesn't have integer divider, however RP2040 has the external unit as an integer divider. In the hardware level, RP2040 also supports interpolators for efficient signal processing. The clock is 125Mhz with two cores in default. Whereas, Raspberry Pi Zero has 1000Mhz clock with one core. Pico can be assumed less power consumption than Zero. Pragmatically, it would be one-fourth of the power consumption of Zero.
3. Popularity of The Company
A lot of alternatives of Arduino are advertised until today. The single-board microcontroller is needed to be supplied well for learners and hobbiests to be aiming their own invention. Raspberry Pi as a company is an excellent vendor in the world of computers. Pi 4 is a good product with enough power. Its operating system also suggests learners to know the world of mathematics and computer scienece. However, some stakeholders may think of retro gaming machines and the silicon sector. I remember that, in the early 2000s, NES emulators had been already existed for Windows machines, and pirated copies against copyrighted software are secretly distributed as image files online. I didn't touch the world at all. Although I don't say some guy had in "trouble", but every copyrighted game is possibly pirated even now.