The new R Pi Pico

Has anyone used one of these yet? Looks like an Arduino Nano but has Pi's own RP2040 dual core chip on it. Apparently Arduino will support it under the standard IDE. Interesting!

Edited By John Haine on 03/02/2021 21:56:45

Not yet John but it has aroused a lot of interest in our Lab workshop. Seems to fit neatly in the gap between the higher performance PIC's and the Pi, a combination of focus on hardware driving with good programming backup and libraries. Interseting product and at that price all to the good.

regards Martin

I thought this comparison was interesting and (I think) fairly balanced.

PCO versus Competition

Regards,

IanT

Sufficiently interesting for me to order one. For the money, the board is significantly faster than the basic Arduinos but I expect it will be electrically delicate. (As are most fast microcontrollers.)

Ease of use is the big selling point for me. There are many boards where the user has to understand terse not-for-children no-holds-barred technical documentation and then set up a complicated tool chain to flash a light or say 'Hello World'. The Arduino environment hides most of the hideous under-the-bonnet complexity and MicroPython is even easier. Both are well supported and documented.

Still possible for beginners to drown at the shallow end, but at least it's not necessary to qualify as a deep-sea diver before going for a paddle!

Dave

Dave, I hope I haven't created a false expectation - it isn't clear that the Arduino IDE yet supports the board as far as I can see - or does it? I agree if it does this will be really interesting, it's cheaper even than a clone Nano! I may get one and try MicroPython for the next clock...

No false expectations here, but it's worth mentioning this is a new development, not fully supported yet. The board has been only been available for about a month and the intent to support it on the Arduino IDE was only announced last week. So not available immediately.

Though I've not tried them MicroPython and Thonny are available now, as is the C SDK. (Might not bother with the SDK because it's not as easy as Arduino IDE will be! Life is too short!)

Like you my plan is to explore MicroPython first. Python is excellent but it's too big to run on any of the small microcontrollers and I want to understand how complete the MicroPython implementation is compared with big brother. Or if MicroPython is able to use both processors on the Pico. Also be interesting to compare Pi Pico Python performance with the same logic written in C and run on a Nano. If the execution speed is comparable, it's quicker and easier to write Python than C/C++.

As if I don't have enough to do already!

Dave

Tell me about it!

Got one last week. Just started using it with Thonny. Easy to get started, just got to get back into Python. Started learning it a couple of years ago, but seem to forgotten most of it.

They are so cheap its worth having a look. However, unless you have other items to order it costs almost much in postage. Pimoroni and The PI Hut both have them back in stock now, although they are limiting it to one per customer. RS will have them in stock as well soon.

There is a lot of documentation available for download, looks like they got ahead of the curve for once, before releasing the board.

There is also a book "The Official Raspberry PI PICO Guide - Get started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico". This sells for about £10 -12. However there is also an official free download although they don't make it very obvious. Its fairly low level but still a good place to get started.

John

I got one last week - my impressions so far are pretty favourable.

I've tried it with C, MicroPython and CircuitPython (the latter is a version of MicroPython put out by Adafruit, potentially useful if you're planning to use the kind of break-out boards they supply)

At the moment everything is all very new, and as SOD says, things will probably be easier when the Arduino toolchain is available. I managed to get a Neo-6M GPS module to work (fairly easy - I found a MicroPython library for it (https://github.com/inmcm/micropyGPS), and an MCU6050 accelerometer/gyro (much harder figuring out how to use the i2c bus, but I've found these tricky to get working even with a pre-made arduino library).

i used Thonny for the MicroPython stuff - it's OK, but a little idiosyncratic.

If I can get it to work with a 480x320 TFT touchscreen it will be really handy for a project I'm working on, though this could be a real challenge - with a bit of luck someone cleverer than me will come up with the necessary magic.

edit: Looks like someone's on the case with the TFT - https://github.com/Bodmer/TFT_eSPI/discussions/934

Edited By Andy Stopford on 04/02/2021 20:04:00

Mine arrived this morning so feeling adventurous I set up the Software Development KIt (SDK) and successfully built their 'Hello World' example.

Ah the good old days! None of this fancy pants button-clicking graphical nonsense the young folk do these days, the Pico C SDK involves typing magic incantations into a console, like I did in 1985. I exaggerate, but the C SDK is about powerful flexibility, not ease of use. Although practical to program the Pico in C now, I recommend waiting for the Arduino IDE to catch up unless you're already familiar with cmake and make. The SDK is foundation level: "To make a beef sandwich first catch a cow..."

MicroPython with Thonney looks far more straightforward and I successfully set both up yesterday ready to try a Python program later today. Nothing clever - I just followed the instructions. Looking at MicroPython there are many differences between it and full-blown Python, but these make sense : new low-level features for micro-controlling whilst high-level features like graph plotting are removed.

Although Raspberry's instructions initially imply Thonny, MicroPython and the C-SDK are for Pi Computers, it all worked on my Ubuntu 20.04 Workstation, and should be OK on Apple and Microsoft too.

Dave

Running mine with Thonny on a W10 laptop. Works fine. Whilst I have lots of different models of RPi's its handy to run it on the laptop and makes it portable.

Don't know if anyone has tried Apple.

John

Been working with the Pico for a couple of weeks now. I work at Kitronik, who do educational electronics - micro:bit, Arduino, solder kits etc.

I *really* like it. My background was in embedded Real time software systems, and this is so easy to use.
Ive not blown it up yet - it’s been chucked in plastic boxes and laptop bags bare so that’s a good sign.
I can see it being the next stage from microbit block programming, and possibly supplanting Arduino for some things.

Dual threading (1 on each core) is trivial, and it has plenty of power. Might look into cnc using it if I get time and inclination - working with computers all day generally means I try to do manual work in the evenings

Dave

My experience too.

MicroPython and Thonny are very easy to use. Though fully functional, C at the moment takes no prisoners - you need to understand a mass of implementation detail. The complexity managed behind the scenes by the Arduino IDE has to be gripped! Work has started on supporting Pico on the IDE but no delivery forecast yet. I don't see any reason why the IDE won't make C/C++ on the Pico as straightforward as the other chips it supports.

The Picos dual core feature is easy to use, though not everything is thread-safe. I found this out trying to use one core for micro-controlling and the other for print(). Print() and serial Input-Output get into a muddle when Thonny tries to update the program. But loads of other stuff just works.

Been experimenting using Micropython to parse NMEA strings from a GPS module. Decoding NMEA involves reading a comma separated line of data fields and deciding what to do with the content. Lines start with an identifier which determines what the fields contain, and some data is packed inconveniently. For example GPS Latitude is sent as 3 fields: degrees, minutes.secondsAsDecimalFractionOfMinute, 'NS'. Useless for calculations, so a latitude like 51,30.333,S needs to be converted to degrees as a simple floating point number: -51.5083333. Although C supports this stuff and the resulting code is super-quick, coding it requires close attention to detail. For the same job Python is much easier to program, test and debug, though the resulting code runs slower. Doesn't matter as long as it's fast enough.

The Pico opens a bunch of interesting doors. It would be possible to write complicated code that doesn't need to run quickly in Python chugging away on one core, whilst high-performance code written in C runs flat out on the other. Best of both worlds.

Not tried CircuitPython yet. It's MicroPython forked by Adafruit plus support for a bunch of their modules. Very useful if one of them is needed. Otherwise there's a shortage of ready to use device libraries.

All very promising and best of all cheap. Post and packing is more expensive than the computer!

Dave

Just been on the PiHut site - 3 per customer now if you want that many

It will be a while before I get to experiment with Pico

... up to my ears in RasPi 4 and USB cameras at the moment

But here’s a direct link to the download page for the book [plus errata] : **LINK**

https://hackspace.raspberrypi.org/books/micropython-pico

MichaelG.