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Comment by 00deadbeef | Hacker News Reader

It's huge compared to the various ESP boards and lacks WiFi or Bluetooth. Costs about the same as a D1 Mini.

The accompanying blog post [1] mentions the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect [2], which includes "a highly efficient power section, a powerful WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the ECC608 crypto chip, enabling anybody to create secure IoT applications with this new microcontroller". It also looks quite small.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-n... [2] https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-t...

Yeah I was excited by that one too, but no mentions of the price and seems like the Wifi chip alone on there can reach 15$... and there's more than that on that board. Knowing Arduino, this will be a 30$+ board.

Other vendors are making dev boards based on the RP2040 at different sizes. SparkFun looks to have some smaller form factors, though I can't see wireless listed on board: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/3707

Pimoroni has a range of "packs" (rather than Hats) on the way, including a wireless one : https://blog.pimoroni.com/pico/

The VGA one (not available yet) looks fantastic https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-vga-demo-ba...

Thanks! We're really proud of it, and it's a heck of a lot of fun too - there's something a bit magic about running an old VGA monitor off this little piece of silicon.

The PIOs allow you to offload actions like outputting the VGA leaving the CPU free to do other things.

Do you guys sell a VGA to HDMI adapter? You might need to!

And that's how the Demo scene came back to life in 2022...

Yes, I wonder what the main advantages are of the Pi Pico versus the various ESP boards that also run MicroPython and are well established.

One potential advantage would be great documentation for beginners.

PIO also looks interesting, however I wonder how much of a factor it is for the target audience.

Documentation and software support often seems to be Raspberry's major advantage. While more niche but powerful hardware existed for a long time in between generations of the Pi the lack of software support/community around it left it buggy and inconsistent. In this case time will tell if it continues to hold true.

Is that as important for a microcontroller, though? It's not like Linux on an SoC, where the pain is vendor kernels that are buggy, incomplete, and/or outdated.

It is for people just starting out.

Arduino runs on ESP8266 and ESP32 chips. It’s a nice introduction to that world, with hardware that’s so inexpensive that it removes the fear of damaging something with a bad connection.

Yes.

Just look at all the plug and play breakout boards available for this at launch. This is going to be huge for kids learning microcontroller programming (which is of course the pi foundation's raison d'etre.

Here is a little list of different products based on that same chip https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/21/third-party-raspberr...

The ESP chips draw obscene amounts of power, this one probably won't even get warm.

Not all (in fact I'd guess even a minority) of embedded systems use bluetooth or wifi.

None of the projects at my current or previous jobs have had bluetooth or wifi

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