Botland loves Raspberry Pi. Following the new PoE+ HAT minicomputer overlay, another release is already waiting on the horizon. As the first and official distributors of Raspberry Pi, we are pleased to confirm the availability date of the designer microcontroller in a standalone release – here’s RP2040.
Gorillaz band has made their album The Fall available online – directly and for all to hear. CD Projekt RED has made free DLC available for its blockbuster The Witcher 3: Wilder Gon. This is such a nice practice. Now there stands before us a small platform that was created thanks to the ideas and work of Raspberry Pi Foundation engineers – although it’s not free, we can admire the version made to tinker with it. Meet the RP2040 microcontroller ready for standalone operation, and so far known mainly as the core of the famous Pico.
Why standalone? The Raspberry Silicon RP2040 is the first microcontroller designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and it’s made on home soil – being developed in the UK. It has already appeared on the Raspberry Pi Pico board and on other boards such as the Pimoroni Tiny 2040 devboard. Raspberry Pi has been designing “normal sized” minicomputers, i.e. ones like the standard Raspberry Pi 4B or slightly smaller versions like the Raspberry Pi Zero so far, but they used third-party chips like those from Broadcom to complete them.
The RP2040 is therefore a proprietary chip from RPi designed from the ground up.
What and for whom is RP2040?
Is it worth getting a microcontroller.
The RP2040 brings to the microcontroller world what we love most about the Raspberry Pi Foundation: high performance, low cost, and ease of use. It features a large on-board memory, symmetrical dual-core processor and rich set of peripherals to use. Enriched with a unique programmable input/output (PIO) subsystem, the chip will provide every professional user with unparalleled power and flexibility. It is worth mentioning that the chip is created in the modern 40nm technological process which, among other things, provides multiple low-power modes and longer battery life.
There’s also something lightweight – with detailed documentation, refined MicroPython port and UF2 bootloader in ROM, RP2040 is open for novice users and hobbyists. And all of this fits a tiny 7 x 7 mm housing!
RP2040 chip now available at Botland store
The component will be available to order as a unit and in quantities of 10 pieces. The ready-to-run RP2040 microcontroller will also be available in rolls of 500 pieces and 3400 pieces. However, you will have to wait until late August or early September for the larger pack.
As a Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller, we already know that the RP2040 standalone microcontroller is already in mass production and will reach you safely packed as soon as possible.
RP2040 basic tech specs
- Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ 133MHz
- 264KB RAM
- 16MB off-chip Flash memory support (QSPI bus)
- DMA (Direct Memory Access) controller
- 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analog inputs
- 2 × UART, 2 × SPI, 2 × I2C controllers
- 16 PWM channels
- 1 × USB 1.1 & PHY controller with host and device support
- 8 × Programmable Input/Output (PIO) state machines
- USB storage boot mode with UF2 support for drag-and-drop programming
More information and detailed technical specifications can be found on the respective product page.
