I was finally able to grab the last 5 Raspberry Pi Pico, I drove an hour to microcenter, couple weeks, ago to find that they were sold out, my son wanted to look at computers so I made the drive and scored 5 Picos.. looking forward to playing with them. These are microcontroller unlike the full blown Raspberry Pi’s.

Datasheet

some specs:

• Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
• 264KB of on-chip RAM
• onboard 2MB Flash
• Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
• DMA controller
• Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
• 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
• 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, 2 × I2C controllers, 3 x 12 Bit ADC
• 16 × PWM channels
• 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
• 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
• USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming
• temperature sensor
• accurate clock and timer on-chip

The chip runs at 3.3V but the board accepts 1.8 - 5.5V (buck boost) - perfect for single lipo or up to 3 AA.

 

Chip datasheet: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf

 

I have two on order, one should be in this week. I only have experience of Arduinos but I would like to learn about Python. I have read that Arduino plan to support it in their IDE soon which would be a good crossover.

 

I purchased five as well from the Michigan Microcenter store last week. Microcenter's $1.99 sale price is very nice, too.

I'm pretty geeked. This is a remarkable little microcontroller board ("digital glue")...

Cheerful regards, Mike

 

Exactly, I’m looking forward to getting more familiar with this chip. hopefully they release the chip. I like just about everything about the chip so far... the board is convenient also.

 

So, who's got this thing doing anything useful? I've put it aside until a C programming environment for Windows comes along.

 

have a look, python is pretty simple - I haven't had a chance to play with it... I have some pressing projects and problems to work through.

 

So, who's got this thing doing anything useful? I've put it aside until a C programming environment for Windows comes along.

Hi John:

Here's a link with instructions for setting up the Pico C/C++ tool chain on Windows. I haven't tried this yet (seems like an awful lot of work) so please let us know how it goes if you try it first.

Cheerful regards, Mike

 

Hi John:

Here's a link with instructions for setting up the Pico C/C++ tool chain on Windows. I haven't tried this yet (seems like an awful lot of work) so please let us know how it goes if you try it first.

Cheerful regards, Mike

Thank you Mike. That is the clearest (actually, the only) set of instructions I've seen, all in one place, which lead a user through the steps needed to create and install C code into the Pico. As Mat Zolnierczyk says, " In the world filled with alternative microcontrollers that simply work with PlatformIO or Arduino IDE, Raspberry Pi Pico SDK falls really short. " I think that by neglecting this, the RPi people made a serious error. For what it's worth, I did get Python loaded and running (using Thonny), but it was so slow that I decided it had no practical use, and I planned to wait for better tools to come along. I'll try to get Mat Zolnierczyk's setup going.

 

Does anyone know if you can track faces and people with raspberry pico and an arducam?

 

I would go with a full raspberry pi for that, using Tensorflow.

 

Do you think that with a raspberry zero i could do that?

 

Also does anyone know if i can make it recognize a person even from his back?

 

I would go with a full raspberry pi for that, using Tensorflow.

Also i saw this https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/0...rry-pi-pico-with-arducam-and-tensorflow-lite/.
Cant i just upload the code? Wont it recognize people after that?
Also can i programm it somehow to follow the person if i have the raspberry pico without a raspberry zero?

 

Also i saw this https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/0...rry-pi-pico-with-arducam-and-tensorflow-lite/.
Cant i just upload the code? Wont it recognize people after that?
Also can i programm it somehow to follow the person if i have the raspberry pico without a raspberry zero?

You can do all of that if you're a good embedded programming that programs in C(++). They show how to create a arducam hardware interface to the ML engine.
https://github.com/ArduCAM/RPI-Pico-Cam
https://github.com/ArduCAM/RPI-Pico-Cam/tree/master/tflmicro

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.08678.pdf

 

You can do all of that if you're a good embedded programming that programs in C(++). They show how to create a arducam hardware interface to the ML engine.
https://github.com/ArduCAM/RPI-Pico-Cam
https://github.com/ArduCAM/RPI-Pico-Cam/tree/master/tflmicro

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.08678.pdf

So i cant use micropython for that?

 

So i cant use micropython for that?

No you can't, now. It's possible some really smart, nice person will write compatible libs for you but that hasn't happened, yet.

"At this point in time, the demos provided by the ArduCAM are developed in C, but the team is currently working to provide support in MicroPython as well"

 

What does it offer above and beyond what's offered by say ST Micro? what's all the fuss about?

 

What does it offer above and beyond what's offered by say ST Micro? what's all the fuss about?

A popular name and a hype trend. If it gets more young people looking at low-level(er) micro-controller programming then it's a good thing.

 

Guyz do you think that combining a raspberry pico with a raspberry zero wouldnt worth it? I was thinking that cause i wanted to use an arducam on the pico but it costs around 26 euros and buying a raspberry zero with a camera module would cost me 20 or 22 euros. So what do you think?