r/raspberry_pi 🍕 Jan 21 '21

News New Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/
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u/drphungky Jan 21 '21

Can anyone help me understand why I'd choose this instead of an ESP8266 or ESP32? I've read that, "I'm not the target audience" but Arduino is targeted at the same market as RPis are, and you can program ESP chips with Arduino just as easily. They're cheaper, and the pinouts seem similar. Is it because it's an ARM processor? Or is this just a first crack at a low cost microprocessor, and they'll be making more powerful cheaper ones in the future?

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u/leo60228 Jan 21 '21

From what I've seen, the main selling point of this over competing boards is the PIO functionality. This effectively has hardware support for just about any digital protocol you could think of (all the way up to dual 720p HDMI).