[elasticventures]

RPI Pico is irrelevant in my view. Seriously checkout RISC-V equivalence (there are many, I like the ESP32-C3)

Linux on RISC-V is real, china is using & standardizing on it. Ditch arm, skip RPI, ignore STM-32, and scoff at TI, .. RISC-V is the future.

While you're at it - skip micropython, skip the OS Linux - use RUST and target RISC-V directly.

The cost of RISC-V is cheap and will only continue to plummet, nothing in the IOT space is going to compete with RISC-V except absurdly expensive niche proprietary solutions that were engineered before the blackhole-esque super-nova gravity hole that is RISC-V which is happening right now in the IOT space. I'm not even sure those will survive, ..

The RISC-V options are only going to continue to increase. I say this because China is using RISC-V for most of it's future everything, it's basically the national chip and there are literally tens of thousands of developers & engineers coming out of school into this ecosystem every single day.

Do not use micropython, avoid all these runtime debugging headaches. Yeah, it might take you a few months or even years to learn RUST, but the concurrency, the power saving, the deterministic behaviors - oh joy! The headaches you will save, the extra rest at night and reduced stress will increase your lifespan.

Qemu RISC-V for emulation + testing and you'll save yourself a ton of time only deploying and supporting code that works. Full simulated environments, you can test in parallel in the cloud, few platforms can do that! RISC-V + RUST it's a joy.

Fewer crashes in the field-- and let me tell ya! .. when you're doing anything IOT that is the only thing that matters - never having a crash in the field, that's better than chocolate cake.

[tverbeure]

A microcontroller is a means to an end. When I need a CPU for an FPGA design, I will always use RISC-V because there's plenty of easy to integrate open source CPUs available. Similarly, when I need a hard microcontroller chip or board, I use whatever suits me best. And then I frankly don't care whether it's RISC-V or ARM. Why should I? I use what's available and has the right features.

There's nothing irrelevant about an RPI Pico: it has more RAM than most, it has excellent documentation and example code, it has PIOs that are incredibly versatile, it's available everywhere, and it's dirt cheap.

For quick prototyping I use MicroPython, otherwise I use C. Why should I have to learn Rust for something simple?

[jazzyjackson]

Do you have any recommendations on how to learn about PIO? I’ve mostly been in the arduino world and got pretty comfortable with AVR features, now I’m writing micropython to control neopixels for a board called the Plasma2040 and instead of bitbanging the signal from a digital pin, it’s apparently generating the signal via PIO, but it’s all black magic to me.

[_Microft]

This is a blog post of someone converting a conventional bit-banged method of driving a display to pure PIO. Maybe it helps getting an idea?

https://www.zephray.me/post/rpi_pico_driving_el/

[jazzyjackson]

It is, at once, both over my head and very encouraging that someone who hasn’t used PIO before was able to achieve this, thanks for the link, I think if I compare this code to what the Plasma library is doing I might be able to tease out what’s happening.

[_Microft]

Did you have a look at chapter 3 of the Raspberry Pi Pico C SDK already by the way? It's about PIO programming.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/c...

[jazzyjackson]

I did not notice they wrote a whole book on the SDK, this looks perfect, thanks again

[tverbeure]

Chapter 3 of the RP2040 datasheet is all about PIO, but it may not be the best wy to learn: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.p...

I find the Pico SDK examples useful to learn, but it requires that you already have a good understanding of the instructions and the protocol that it implements. Here's the I2C PIO program, for example: https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples/blob/master/pio....

[jazzyjackson]

Hey I managed to miss that raspberrypi repo since I jumped straight into my neopixel project, many thanks

[gaze]

I don't know how you can say it's irrelevant. Multiple standards can exist concurrently. Not even because they deserve to, but because people like them and are comfortable with them even if they are or aren't a bit crappy.

Also the RP2040 is a great chip and it's super available and it's super cheap. And it runs Rust.

[joezydeco]

Ditch arm, skip RPI, ignore STM-32, and scoff at TI, .. RISC-V is the future.

Can you point to any parts that are in full production and have a 5-7 year supply horizon?

[NowhereMan]

Since I like to build custom electronics using JLCPCB, I went on there and looked for RISC-V chips. I found the ESP32-C3 and a dozen or so Chinese chips that seemed to only have Chinese datasheets. It seems that things are still pretty immature in RISC-V adoption. I will be getting a ESP32-C3 dev board to tinker with at least.

[joezydeco]

The projects I work on need long time horizons and industrial or automotive environmental specs. RISC-V will be hardware cosplay (h/t n-gate!) until that time, as far as I can see it.

[bschwindHN]

I just built a keyboard based on the RP2040 because it's cheap, capable, obtainable, and you can also write rust for it. The RP2040 is interesting though with its PIO peripheral.

Do you know of any RISC-V chips which have something like that? Generally curious too about which RISC-V chips are as widely available as the RP2040

[throwntoday]

Thanks for the recommendation on ESP32-C3. I've been wanting to work with a cheap RISC-V chip. Unfortunately the lead time on mouser is 9 weeks and it only offers 22 GPIO.

In contrast the RP2040 is readily available, has 30 GPIO, and the Pico dev board is only $4. I'm not building an IoT device for my next project so I consider the die space dedicated to those features wasted.

I recognize this post is about IoT but I just wanted to say I don't think the RP2040 or Pico are irrelevant. The platform has it's benefits. In my case, relying more on the SOC and not having to increase BOM.