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New sub £4 embedded controller from raspberry pi

stumblor said:
Don't think there anything that goes into that level of detail, but that's a great idea. Like a shop log. I've got a project come up that uses a nano to monitor lamps, coils and switches (physical, not from the matrix) I could put together a little how to guide for that if there is an interest?
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Monitoring the switches and lamps is fun and not trivial.

David
 
stumblor said:
Speaking of which Jim, are you going to make those boards available to the public (or are they already?) got my sights set on a Diner dmd conversion at some point!
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Yes if you want to use the boardset for your own project then you can buy one along with the dmd panel. I am also thinking of making my dmd & font conversion tools available with the kit to along with a basic game skeleton to use. This wont be open source though just end user for your own project etc.

The boards are still beta ish really right now, but if you let me know your time scales i can see what i have available etc. I am also thinking about a self build kit option for the board if people have the skills and/or want to source their own parts, but this isnt a definite yet.
 
Happy to wait until you are out of beta Jim - lord knows I have enough projects on at the moment anyway. So 6-12 months fine by me. Pre built preferable in all honesty (I do enough soldering) but kit would be fine too. Definately bundling with the game skeleton and additional tools would be a plus. I'm excited to take it for a spin, the work you've done on whirlwind is incredible.
 
It would be great if there was a resource/repository that shared some of the technical stuff that drives pinball systems.

Particularly intercepting commands from the Processor such as sound, lights, switches and DMD. Clearly it has been worked out by Comp, and Lucky, and yourself Jim - along with various others who have implemented some cool mods - Tilt!Audio is another example.

But the techniques used to take the info is hard to find, and not easily accessible in my experience.
 
MadNat said:
It would be great if there was a resource/repository that shared some of the technical stuff that drives pinball systems.

Particularly intercepting commands from the Processor such as sound, lights, switches and DMD. Clearly it has been worked out by Comp, and Lucky, and yourself Jim - along with various others who have implemented some cool mods - Tilt!Audio is another example.

But the techniques used to take the info is hard to find, and not easily accessible in my experience.
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All the data is on the data and address busses, I hooked an esp32 into it and could see a lot of the data fairly easily.
 
Fubar said:
As you say I don't think it matters to most people -in particular RPi's target audience- but nonetheless that is a slightly naive comparison in my personal opinion. M0+ vs M3/M4 core will make a big difference in terms of performance. Dual-core sounds great, except their SDK doesn't use the second one (plus concurrent programming introduces other problems). Flash is bigger but it's also off-chip - you can hook a SPI flash to any existing MCU and get similar storage capacity. If you have a use for more RAM, you can just go up the STM32 food chain and get a beefier part. Support and long-term availability are not going to be a problem with either manufacturer. UK shipping is great if you don't have one already - it doubles the cost though :) The point I was making is that there's nothing new here - it's just packaged/marketed better (and I appreciate the value of that!)

I'm not saying one solution is better than the other - the target audience is just different. If this helps more people get into embedded that's great and I'm all for it. RPi have also historically been better at not creating walled gardens, and the work they're doing in education is fantastic :thumbs: Kids really need to grow up knowing more about how technology works.
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Ah, didn't notice the Flash was off-chip.

That's a shame - I guess that means all code + data must fit into the RAM. Makes the RAM allocation seem less generous. [EDIT] Looks like it can run programs directly from Flash memory - nice.

I also completely agree about the complexities of multi-threaded coding and the ARM core spec differences.

Didn't realise what the PIO stuff was. As described by @myPinballs looks very interesting, although probably not trivial to use from scratch.
 
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Still waiting for my Compute module 4 as I think those are super cool and so many options available with ram/eemc/wifi

blows my mind something so small can run full blown Linux desktop.

these new micros do look pretty cool though :)
 
Aaannnd... it's gone. Raspberry Pico sold out for all UK suppliers.
 
Andreas covers that in his review above - (I believe it's the same chip). Overall, not that great - especially when you consider WiFi on the ESP devices.

But people love the Pi (as do I), and at £0.85 each and a much more discreet package I reckon it will be very useful.
 
Esp32 still a more useful / bang for your Buck chip in my opinion just because of the speed/WiFi support. But if that’s not needed in your projects it’s probably a useful little chip :)
 
I'd have been happy with QFP, at least that's reasonable to hand-solder. But I understand why they went with QFN (and probably can't afford to have multiple SKUs).

To be fair, ESP is also QFN. I'm sure someone will design a minimalist carrier PCB for the RP2040 which can fit into a socket.
 
Fubar said:
I'd have been happy with QFP, at least that's reasonable to hand-solder. But I understand why they went with QFN (and probably can't afford to have multiple SKUs).

To be fair, ESP is also QFN. I'm sure someone will design a minimalist carrier PCB for the RP2040 which can fit into a socket.
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Yeah we can all do that, but its not as clean as it could be. If it was to add another £1, £2, £3 to the cost for extra packages who cares.. Not expensive anyway
 
Was going to suggest the same - QFN-56 breakouts are cheap enough. 56 pin sockets would be more cost I guess.
 
I don't think the package matters, the single chip is aimed at people/companies who design pcb's so it does not really matter what form it comes in (usually smaller the better) Most hobbiest/hackers would just use the normal dev board version.
 
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