Last week, as I was trying to solve the mysteries of Bluetooth programming (more on that in a future post), I received an email announcing the Raspberry Pi Pico’s arrival. Quickly glancing at the Pico’s description, my first thoughts were, “YAAA” (yet another Arduino alternative). I yawned and went back to the frustrations of Bluetooth (or maybe we should call it Root Canal) programming.
Not long after, more emails arrived - one from Sparkfun, another from Adafruit, another from Pimoroni, and more from other hardware vendors. All were announcing they were going to release boards designed around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip. Even Arduino announced it is going to get on board with the RP2040.
I was blown away. As significant as the accomplishment of the RP2040 is for the Raspberry Pi team, in my opinion, the real achievement was coordinating releases by all the major hardware vendors. Never before have so many competitors coalesced around a single chip, all announcing on the same day.
Why is this so consequential? First, each hardware manufacturer will be building boards to support their own unique eco-system. For example, Adafruit will be building on the Feather, and Sparkfun is developing several unique offerings around their eco-system. This in and of itself is exciting because if you have bought into a manufacturer’s eco-system, you can still use their peripherals with the new chip. This is really neat, but for me, the significant accomplishment is that there will be unified software support structure across all the boards and manufacturers.
With the RP2040, one can program in C if you wish to go that route. And in fact, Arduino will be releasing an Arduino Core for the RP2040. In addition, MicroPython and its derivative, CircuitPython is available right at the starting gate. Not only can you pick a board form factor and hardware eco-system, but your software efforts also have a high probability of being portable between the various boards, form factors, and eco-systems.
I don’t know how the Raspberry Pi folks managed to pull off such a coordinated effort among this modern-day version of a “Team of Rivals.” Pure genius! Imagine coordinating a chip design, software support, and portability between rival manufacturers, and having them all announce on the same day is really something to marvel over. And now, even more, are jumping on the bandwagon. Seeed Studio just announced Grove support for the Pico. All we need now are for the headers to be pre-soldered on the board offerings!
Well done, Raspberry Pi! In this time of great sadness and worry, it is nice to see such cooperation and hope for the future.