No one even mentioned the new Raspberry Pi Pico?

[mrburnette]

Most hobbyists will not stock more than 2 or 3 different microcontrollers

I think I have a bit of a problem, I've got over 70 here

"a bit" is definitely not strong enough of a descriptive phrase ... maybe "a huge" would be more appropriate

Seriously, senior forum members are not in the same class as "most hobbyists". My thinking was actually more along the lines of "architecture" rather than specific chips... that is, "AVR 8-bitters", "Espressif 32-bitters", etc. This makes more sense because the build chain is identical in those categories. As Arduino IDE is but a facade on top of the manufacturer's tool chain, unless one pays particular attention to what gets loaded, you are pretty much at the mercy of the JSON installation.

I have not installed the PICO C++ dev environment (yet) as I have not decided which of my development machines (Linux or Windows) will be the guinea pig ... I am inclined to seriously think about my Raspberry Pi 4B as the target since a screw-up simply means rebuilding an SD card.

One last thought; microPython (or CircuitPython) seems to be a very good alternative for many users. I have played around with this for over a month and once I switched to CircuitPython and Mu, my experience was much better. Thonny does come pre-installed in many Raspberry Pi installs. I have played with microPython on the Espressif chips and generally the Pico feels about the same as the ESP32 at 160MHz... just subjective. Anyway, Adafruit's CircuitPython modifications to microPython seem to be a better fit ( for me) coming into the Pico from Arduino - especially in pin naming nomenclature. In addition, Ladyada has more libraries compiled into the core Python binary which make using CircuitPython simpler for common sensors (like sold by Adafruit!) Longtime microPython users may dislike CircuitPython because of the changes, especially the inability to interrogate the machine's state after a program ends (Adafruit does a reset after a program ends and before the REPL is available.)

Anyway; I strongly suggest everyone that purchases a Pico to try the CircuitPython codebase ... at least do the 'blinky.py' to get a feel and I encourage you to maybe go a bit more into the Python paradigm. No, it is not as fast or as mean as C++, but you may find that it is as fast as you need and having the REPL allows you to test ideas in real time using nothing more than a serial terminal. https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-star ... n?view=all

[BennehBoy]

Yeah I've got a fair cross section of devices, but predominantly AVR, STM23, & ESP. The latter of which I've just dusted off again to start looking at some home automation, Node Red, MTQQ, etc. Fairly mundane uses however, monitoring the temperature in my shed remotely

I've also got a few pi's and was similarly thinking of using a pi 3 as a simple dev env. Although I do have Ubuntu Server running on a beefed up HP microserver that would serve equally well as a dev system (with a local X implementation as the desktop on my Win10 main machine).

It all keeps the mind ticking over at least.

[BennehBoy]

I guess those interested have likely already found this, but there's a lot of good info around getting a c++ toolchain upo and running on various platforms against different IDE's here -> https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico ... h-pico.pdf

[DiTBho]

looks awesome, RPI finally get their hand into microcontrollers. A $4 dual M0 core 264kB sram 2MB flash USB support, I think it's only a matter of time for Arduino support. Before that I would still stick to ESP32

Can you compare it with Teensy v4?
I am building a "high precision" GPS-based distance meter and it looks interesting.

[DiTBho]

The USB capability looks also interesting, but I haven't yet read the documentation and I don't know how good and fast it goes with Bulk-data.

[mlundin]

Teensy 4 is a Cortex M7 at 600Hz with hardware floating point, and the Pico is a dual core Cortex M0+ at 133Mhz
Now for some very specialized tasks the Pico just might be faster, but overall its not in the same league.

Teensy 4 has a quite extensive software support with both USB host and client, at the same time.

On the other hand price is quite different, so its a matter of cost , time to make things work, existing software support,
hard to say which is preferable.

A high precision GPS distance sensor, how much computational power does your microprocessor need, and how much is on the GPS module ??

[mrburnette]

...
Can you compare it with Teensy v4?
I am building a "high precision" GPS-based distance meter and it looks interesting.

https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/65899-Ra ... light=pico

Paul:

Pico does indeed look really interesting. I've only just learned about it minutes ago. So far I don't know much about it. At only $4, it certainly is much cheaper! It's said to be Cortex-M0 at 133 MHz, so you can probably expect performance similar to Teensy LC but with ~3X the clock speed. It claims to have large RAM, but no mention of caching (M0 generally doesn't do caches) so my guess is that RAM gets used if you want code to run fast (much like ITCM on Teensy 4).

[dannyf]

interesting chip.

went through the datasheet quickly.
1. don't know how to use the two cores concurrently; how to switch from one to another ...;
2. PIO modules are very interesting. not sure what to use them for but very interesting;
3. 64-bit system timer;
4. lots of PWMs but very little timer/counter;

seemed to be designed to be programmed more or less like a SoC, vs. a microcontroller. not even sure if it has support for CMSIS - tragic if not.

[mrburnette]

...
seemed to be designed to be programmed more or less like a SoC, vs. a microcontroller. not even sure if it has support for CMSIS - tragic if not.

After a month of non-consecutive play, I have come to believe that this the chip that everyone that does IoT wishes had already been on the Raspberry Pi for ease of interfacing sensors and external signals.

Multicore example header

I have worked with ESP32 multicore which is simplified under Arduino as FreeRTOS provides the threading API. After the Arduino folks produce their RP2040 Arduino board, an RTOS will likely be available; then it all boils down to threading.

For example, on the ESP32 by default, RF "stuff" is on core_0 and Arduino stuff is on core_1 ... thus, sleep on Arduino will not cause starvation for RF protocols.

[ag123]

i'd guess soon there'd be a dual core or even quad core pico
what i read about 'multi core' is that the 'os' literally run concurrently on each one of the cores, this is very different from the systick interrupt driven multi-tasking