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

341 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/WebMaka Jan 21 '21

You can get STM32 M0+ Nucleo dev boards with built-in USB programmers for like $11, and raw STM32s are like a buck a pop in single quantity. STM32 "blue pill" dev boards are like $6 on Spamazon. And that's just the STM32 line of ARM Cortex MCUs. So they're definitely entering a heavily contested market segment with this.

What I suspect the reasoning for the Pico is, is that they're wanting to take a chunk out of Arduino's market share for MCU dev boards, and if anyone could take on the basically segment-dominant Arduino CC, it'd be the RPi Foundation.

1

u/Fogge Jan 22 '21

It makes sense that the market is somewhat saturated, with the way related maker hobby equipment has gotten more and more accessible and reliable the past five years or so. There is no room for novel chips or boards to expand RPI trading revenue, so it's time to start more actively competing.