[05]

Well, parallel port adc capture has nothing to do with PIO either - on STM32 you would just set up DMA on a GPIO port, then capture 16bit data. The real question is what RP2040 is going to do with 120MB/s of data.. and the answer is, it can't process it or send it over (12Mbps aka 1.5MB/s) USB. So, would only work in low duty cycle pulse mode, no streaming.

[zipy124]

It is designed for short captures. You can see the practical applications at: https://un0rick.cc/use_cases .

I can assure you these use cases are hard to achieve with a standard STM32 as someone whos almost finished with their PhD in mid-air ultrasonics.

[kelu124]

Hi, author here. I must say I'm not 100% confident in everything the STM32s do - and the rp2040/rp2350 is an easy one. One of my pieces of work is : continuous acquisition, acquisitions, processing, and writing on a fast storage, which allows for continuous 10MB/s+. All of this can be managed through the 2 cores, and the PIOs.

In short, PIOs are really a game changer, I have dumped a FPGA from the previous iteration to go rp2040.

BUT... solutions like some of PIC32 and their integrated 40Msps ADC are really nice and worth exploring (if I had the time). The positive thing about the pico is that it's so common and tools are so common that it's really a pleasure developping on this device =)