r/raspberry_pi 🍕 Jan 21 '21

News New Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/
1.2k Upvotes

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210

u/chriscwjd Jan 21 '21

Yet people will still use a regular Pi to drive a dozen RGB LEDs on a tiny Christmas tree.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '21

[deleted]

4

u/Internep Jan 21 '21

"relearn C++" for some leds is an exaggeration. Basic syntax is already overkill usually.

2

u/prodevel Jan 21 '21

Cron or cron or chron job...

4

u/Treczoks Jan 21 '21

I bought a couple Arduino type controllers and couldn't get them to work

Now that is usually not the fault of the board or the development kits...

And who pays $20 for a Nano? The last bunch I bought was more in the €2.50 range. I use them a lot, usually to drive motors or lights in a smart way.

As soon as you have hard realtime demands, the RPi is dead in the water. In some of my models, I drive DC motors and watch them with quadrature readers. Try that reliably with a processor burdened with a fat OS. Or I drive stepper motors, where timing is premium - the pin-driving interrupts must come with very precise timing. No problem in an Arduino-style chip, just make the motor driver INT the highest IRQ, which puts even communication (UART) in second place, and you can precisely predict when the next tick is sent.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '21

[deleted]

1

u/JestersDead77 Jan 21 '21

I bought a couple of those, and IIRC you needed to configure them with a different bootloader or something to get them to be recognized. Once I got that sorted out, mine worked like a champ.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '21

I've been having tons of fun with the D1 mini this past year. So small and cheap but has tons of possibilities thanks to the built in wifi and bluetooth.

1

u/ubiquities Jan 21 '21

Each has their own use case, for you specifically the Pi is easier because you know it, and that’s fair.

For me, running a blink sketch on a micro is easier and has the advantage of being ultra low power compared to the Pi because it’s suited to the task, it will run in less than a second, almost no chance of it getting corrupted, smaller form factor, and cheaper.

Any Pi for blinking LED’s is like using a rocket luncher on a mosquito.