I have been using RPI pico for my projects lately. It is really nice mcu, tooling is pretty good, and the development process using i.e. vscode is pretty straightforward. Documentation is also pretty good. Functionality wise, pretty much standard features, but PIO stands out, a lot of potential there on future iterations (i can imagine a mini-fpga in each pin of the device).
But i went back to stm32fx after finding many many issues integrating an sd card, i waste so many hours debugging the issue that works flawlessly on the stm32, is very probable that is my fault but i couldnt continue throwing time into it. other than that has bright future, specially PIO and RISCV core.
In February, the RP2040 was officially declared 200 MHz capable. All that’s left now is for the RP2350 to be declared the same. Right now it’s only 150 MHz.
Kudos to Raspberry Pi for addressing the known issues with a new stepping in just a year! I feel like that's a pretty great turn around for errata that they could have pointed to the workarounds for and delayed this indefinitely with not much pushback.
Just make sure to keep VDDIO powered when 5V is applied to any GPIO pad, otherwise the pad will be damaged. And be sure to read the relevant sections in the updated datasheet.
Feeling good about building most new applications around this chip, might stick with it for the better part of a decade or more if they release a compatible successor.
I really like the rp2040-zero and used it in most of my embedded Rust projects.
Right now the "rp2350 mini zero" costs me about 4.50€/unit to source on aliexpress, while the rp2040-zero costs me about 2€/unit.
So I'm probably going to stick to the rp2040 for now. I'm looking forward to eventually switching to the faster rp2350 if the price drops a little bit.
Raspberry Pi Foundation failing to communicate their development of this stepping will results in tens of thousands recently bought A2-stepping devices ending up in the landfill.
IMHO, the issue [edit: once understood/documented] was overhyped. From browsing blogs/forums you'd think the chip was completely useless. But many uses of the chip didn't run into the problem, and others could be solved with external resistors. Even https://github.com/gusmanb/logicanalyzer eventually found a nice RP2350 design.
I think they didn't preannounce because it could have taken longer than expected and people would have held orders in the meantime, which could have been a problem. [1]
Although they did do this a little bit:
> Eventually all Pico 2 products will use the A4 stepping. While the A3 stepping will not be made available to silicon customers, approximately 30,000 units of A3 inventory will be used to build Pico 2 and Pico 2 W products.
~~I'm hesistant to buy a Pico 2 or Pico 2 W right now because I might get this weird stepping that could have issues almost no one else ever sees.~~ [edit: not so much after seeing phire's comment and the bootrom-only changes in the datasheet.]
The number of people worried about the errata is much larger than the number of people actually impacted by it. The errata has been known for a long time.
I have been using RPI pico for my projects lately. It is really nice mcu, tooling is pretty good, and the development process using i.e. vscode is pretty straightforward. Documentation is also pretty good. Functionality wise, pretty much standard features, but PIO stands out, a lot of potential there on future iterations (i can imagine a mini-fpga in each pin of the device). But i went back to stm32fx after finding many many issues integrating an sd card, i waste so many hours debugging the issue that works flawlessly on the stm32, is very probable that is my fault but i couldnt continue throwing time into it. other than that has bright future, specially PIO and RISCV core.
The "one more thing" about the I/O being 5v tolerant note at the very end of this is a nice addition.
In February, the RP2040 was officially declared 200 MHz capable. All that’s left now is for the RP2350 to be declared the same. Right now it’s only 150 MHz.
Kudos to Raspberry Pi for addressing the known issues with a new stepping in just a year! I feel like that's a pretty great turn around for errata that they could have pointed to the workarounds for and delayed this indefinitely with not much pushback.
Does anybody know if there exist RP2354 with a stepping earlier than a A4?
Note that this new stepping fixes the notorious E9 erratum which caused GPIOs to misbehave.
Additionally, for those integrating the chip into retrocomputing addons/mods, "RP2350 is now officially 5V tolerant".
One odd thing in the post is mention of a test A3 variant, of which 30,000 will be put on random Pico 2 and Pico 2W boards.
The A3 stepping is documented in the updated datasheet, which has a really nice "Hardware Revision History" in Appendix C.
It has all the hardware changes and most of the bootrom changes of A4.
Feeling good about building most new applications around this chip, might stick with it for the better part of a decade or more if they release a compatible successor.
I really like the rp2040-zero and used it in most of my embedded Rust projects.
Right now the "rp2350 mini zero" costs me about 4.50€/unit to source on aliexpress, while the rp2040-zero costs me about 2€/unit.
So I'm probably going to stick to the rp2040 for now. I'm looking forward to eventually switching to the faster rp2350 if the price drops a little bit.
Raspberry Pi Foundation failing to communicate their development of this stepping will results in tens of thousands recently bought A2-stepping devices ending up in the landfill.
IMHO, the issue [edit: once understood/documented] was overhyped. From browsing blogs/forums you'd think the chip was completely useless. But many uses of the chip didn't run into the problem, and others could be solved with external resistors. Even https://github.com/gusmanb/logicanalyzer eventually found a nice RP2350 design.
I think they didn't preannounce because it could have taken longer than expected and people would have held orders in the meantime, which could have been a problem. [1]
Although they did do this a little bit:
> Eventually all Pico 2 products will use the A4 stepping. While the A3 stepping will not be made available to silicon customers, approximately 30,000 units of A3 inventory will be used to build Pico 2 and Pico 2 W products.
~~I'm hesistant to buy a Pico 2 or Pico 2 W right now because I might get this weird stepping that could have issues almost no one else ever sees.~~ [edit: not so much after seeing phire's comment and the bootrom-only changes in the datasheet.]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
It's all documented in the updated datasheet (see Appendix C)
All the hardware changes and most of the bootrom changes went into A3. A4 is only a minor bootrom update.
The chance of an A3-only errata is tiny.
Thanks! I should have looked there first. I feel better about buying a board with an A3 after seeing that.
The number of people worried about the errata is much larger than the number of people actually impacted by it. The errata has been known for a long time.
Why? The errata are known, designs have workarounds that can be kept. There's no reason to not install the old stock.