Raspberry Pi Enters Microcontroller Game with $4 Pico
Whilst there are certainly other boards with more features/higher specs at similar prices I think the pico has a few things going for it<p>1. It's at cheap ebay/aliexpress prices but is a first party board supported by the chip manufacturer, not a third party clone.<p>2. The full raspberry pi ecosystem has a good range of hardware and software, the pico will hopefully see the same.<p>3. The internal architecture has some fun features. The DMA engine supports chaining DMA channels and one set of DMA operations can program and trigger another channel. Plus you can trigger transactions on when they're needed by the endpoint or on a timer. You can program in complex behaviours with this and just set it off and go without needing further CPU control.<p>More unique than the DMA is the PIO, 8 programmable state machines that have FIFOs and port access. This allows you to add support for protocols you don't have hardware for. This avoids bit banging and gives precise real-time control. You can do things like drive VGA and there's even an HDMI demo (possibly a bit too hacky to be used in production though).<p>I've just had one arrive today, going to spend the weekend seeing what I can do with just DMA and PIO whilst the CPU sits idle, maybe dealing with the occasional interrupt.