The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a new product called the Raspberry Pico. It’s a microcontroller board with a powerful 32-bit ARM CPU at the low cost of £3.50.
It looked like a useful tool to add to the toolbox for future projects so I ordered one and put together a quick test project.
The tooling and documentation is good: The SDK is open source and compiles with the gcc ARM toolchain. There is a set of examples demonstrating the various built-in peripherals. The Pico appears as a USB mass storage device and you can program the flash by simply copying a binary to the drive. This means you don’t need to install any drivers or applications to get started.
For my test project, I attached an I2C OLED display and I2C temperature and humidity sensor from Adafruit to make a temperature and humidity sensor with graph display. Given the Pico’s low cost, I didn’t bother with breadboarding and just soldered directly to the board.
Overall I was impressed with the Raspberry Pico and expect it will come in handy.
