On the 21st of January, 2021, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released its own microcontroller board called the Raspberry Pi Pico. Despite its name, the Pico is a microcontroller, not a small microcomputer (i.e., a Single Board Computer or SBC) like the Raspberry Pi, uses a different CPU chipset (the RP2040, a proprietary design by the Raspberry Pi Foundation), and is significantly smaller and cheaper than any Pi at US$4.

Specification#

The Raspberry Pi Pico (click to enlarge)

• 21 mm × 51 mm form factor
• RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the UK
• Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
• 264KB on-chip SRAM
• 2MB on-board QSPI Flash
• 26 multifunction GPIO pins, including 3 analogue inputs
• 2 × UART, 2 × SPI controllers, 2 × I2C controllers, 16 × PWM channels
• 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
• 8 × Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support
• Supported input power 1.8–5.5V DC
• Operating temperature -20°C to +85°C
• Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards
• Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB
• Low-power sleep and dormant modes
• Accurate on-chip clock
• Temperature sensor
• Accelerated integer and floating-point libraries on-chip

Pinout#

Pico Pinout (click to enlarge)

Links#

• Pico Specification (Raspberry Pi Foundation)
• Getting Started (Raspberry Pi Foundation)
• Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Pico (34.6MB PDF, local copy)

• Raspberry Pi Pico Python SDK (2.8MB PDF, local copy)

• Hardware design with RP2040 (19.7MB PDF, local copy)
• RP2040 Datasheet (4.9MB PDF, Raspberry Pi Foundation)
• RP2040 on Wikipedia