We've made plenty, so supply shouldn't be an issue. Like the zero, we're giving it away for free on the front of a magazine as well. - https://hackspace.raspberrypi.org/issues/39
Under the “Raspberry Pi Pico” subheading it says ”Raspberry Pi Pico is designed as our low-cost breakout board for RP2040. It pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash memory, and a power supply chip supporting input voltages from 1.8-5.5V.”
You're going to have to provide a link to whatever you're talking about. The Pi Pico is the only hardware product that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is releasing to the general public today. They have partners releasing other products based on the RP2040.
I think you're referring to the Pi Pico, but you think it's called something else. There is no product called "Pi Si", as far as I can find. The link that this HN post is pointing to is about the Pi Pico.
If you're just referring to the chip itself ("Raspberry Silicon", "RP2040"), all surface mount chips have to be used on a "motherboard" (PCB) of some kind, so the question seems irrelevant. Based on the datasheet, yes, the chip seems to have no internal flash, so you have to use an external flash chip, but even if it did have internal flash... you would still have to use the chip on a PCB, so it doesn't matter in regards to the original question.
The details aren't totally clear to me, but it seems (https://twitter.com/pimoroni/status/1161319177262706688) they opened Pimoroni GmbH as a German subsidiary just after the Brexit vote for exactly this reason, so maybe they have a warehouse on the continent somewhere?
With two fast cores and and a large amount of on-chip RAM, > RP2040 is a great platform for machine learning applications. You can find Pete Warden’s port of Google’s TensorFlow Lite framework here. Look out for more machine learning content over the coming months.
The proof will be in the pudding, right?
I guess they mean inference. Looking forward to seeing the use-cases.
If there is no schematic and you can't buy the chip alone e.g. on Mouser then that's a pass. You can't do anything serious otherwise and you get locked in. Better get something like stm32 or teensy.
Agreed. I guess that very neat programmable IO could be considered as something that would cause lock-in, but in this case, I think the lock-in factor is fair - they are delivering something reasonable unique.
The companion arduino product released alongside this has WiFi/BLE [1].
Anyway, RPi as a brand carries a lot of weight. I can be sure this is a well-polished product that'll be both easy to learn and easy to go from prototype to final product. My experience with ESP had more rough edges. Maybe those have been paved over in the 5 years since I had a go at the ESP8266, but that's still an unknown to me, whereas if I go with the Pi I have no doubts.
The programmable IO peripherals on this part are awesome. They are 8 state machines that can toggle IO at "light speed" - the system clock rate - based on a small assembly program, with lots of hardware accelerated FIFOs and shifting.
The datasheet for the accelerators is pretty rich and well written with a ton of examples (an oddity for typically poorly-documented state machines - looking at you, i.MX DMA).
Someone had fun with it (and it also pretty clearly makes the point that these are not general purpose coprocessor accelerators):
> Although not designed for computation, PIO is quite likely Turing-complete, and it is conjectured that it could run DOOM,
given a sufficiently high clock speed. [...] A full 32-bit addition takes only around one minute at 125 MHz.
> // Pop quiz: how many additions does the processor do when calling this function [to set up the PIO addition program]
30 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 77.3 ms ] thread(I see an IC that looks like a serial flash in the picture, but not mention of it in the text)
I think you're referring to the Pi Pico, but you think it's called something else. There is no product called "Pi Si", as far as I can find. The link that this HN post is pointing to is about the Pi Pico.
If you're just referring to the chip itself ("Raspberry Silicon", "RP2040"), all surface mount chips have to be used on a "motherboard" (PCB) of some kind, so the question seems irrelevant. Based on the datasheet, yes, the chip seems to have no internal flash, so you have to use an external flash chip, but even if it did have internal flash... you would still have to use the chip on a PCB, so it doesn't matter in regards to the original question.
I'm not so sure, 264KB of RAM is not great for machine learning.
The proof will be in the pudding, right?
I guess they mean inference. Looking forward to seeing the use-cases.
From the linked blog post:
We hope to make RP2040 broadly available in the second quarter of 2021.
Schematics for a demo board/etc and a very detailed datasheet:
https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/hardware_design_wi...
https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.p...
Anyway, RPi as a brand carries a lot of weight. I can be sure this is a well-polished product that'll be both easy to learn and easy to go from prototype to final product. My experience with ESP had more rough edges. Maybe those have been paved over in the 5 years since I had a go at the ESP8266, but that's still an unknown to me, whereas if I go with the Pi I have no doubts.
[1] https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-t...
The datasheet for the accelerators is pretty rich and well written with a ton of examples (an oddity for typically poorly-documented state machines - looking at you, i.MX DMA).
Someone had fun with it (and it also pretty clearly makes the point that these are not general purpose coprocessor accelerators):
> Although not designed for computation, PIO is quite likely Turing-complete, and it is conjectured that it could run DOOM, given a sufficiently high clock speed. [...] A full 32-bit addition takes only around one minute at 125 MHz.
> // Pop quiz: how many additions does the processor do when calling this function [to set up the PIO addition program]
Lol.