By The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi board. And it's tiny this time! Say hello to your next DIY project with a Raspberry Pi Pico!
The already small sized existing Raspberry Pi boards seem to be huge compared to this tiny little board as it is more or less the size of a finger.
The best thing? The pico is already available! You can buy it for more or less $4 from many retailers. Or you get the latest edition of the HackSpace magazine – it added a free Raspberry Pi Pico in it.
Raspberry Pi's first own microchip
Something very new in this little board is the new microchip, the RP2040. RP standing for Raspberry Pi and, understandably, the Raspberry Pi foundation is very proud of this. The microchip is based on a ARM Cortex chip. We believe this microchip lays the ground for future (and also larger) Raspberry Pi editions with their own microchips.
Other micro-board producers, such as Adafruit and Arduino also announced their own boards with the RP2040 chip.
What about Performance?
Don't expect you can run Windows 10 on this board – these times have not (yet) come. But for a small Linux (such as Raspberry Pi OS – previously known as Raspbian) and for working with sensors, it is perfect.
- Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz
- 264KB (remember kilobytes?) of on-chip RAM
- Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus
- DMA controller
- Interpolator and integer divider peripherals
- 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs
- 2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers
- 16 × PWM channels
- 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
- 8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines
- USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming
A quick first look at retailers and prices
A quick overview over retailers (partnered with Raspberry Pi) and their prices of the Pico.
| Country | Retailer | Price | Standard Shipping |
| Australia | Core Electronics | AUD 5.75 | + AUD 6.95 |
| Australia | PiAustralia | AUD 5.75 | unknown |
| Austria | Welectron | EUR 4.20 | + EUR 3.95 |
| Austria | BerryBase | EUR 4.13 | + EUR 5.90 |
| Belgium | MC Hobby | EUR 4.08 | unknown |
| Canada | BuyaPi | CAD 5.25 | + CAD 12.00 |
| Canada | CanaKit | CAD 5.25 | + CAD 12.95 |
| France | Kubii | EUR 4.20 | + EUR 3.90 |
| France | elektorstore | EUR 4.95 | + EUR 7.95 |
| Germany | Welectron | EUR 4.20 | + EUR 3.95 |
| Germany | Reichelt | EUR 3.95 | + EUR 5.95 |
| Germany | BerryBase | EUR 4.10 | + EUR 4.95 |
| Germany | Rasppishop | EUR 4.49 | + EUR 4.90 |
| Germany | Funk24 | EUR 4.10 | + EUR 4.50 |
| Netherlands | Raspberry Store | EUR 4.50 | + EUR 4.43 |
| Netherlands | elektorstore | EUR 4.95 | + EUR 4.95 |
| Netherlands | Kiwi Electronics | EUR 4.50 | + EUR 2.50 |
| Sweden | electro:kit | SEK 49.00 | + SEK 23.20 (+taxes) |
| Switzerland | Pi-Shop | CHF 4.75 | + CHF 6.90 |
| Switzerland | BerryBase | CHF 4.75 | + CHF 9.50 |
| United Kingdom | Okdo | GBP 3.71 | + GBP 2.99 |
| United Kingdom | Pimoroni | GBP 3.60 | + GBP 2.50 |
| United Kingdom | The Pi Hut | GBP 3.60 | + GBP 2.99 |
| United Kingdom | sb components | GBP 3.59 | + GBP 3.10 |
| United States | adafruit | USD 5.00 | unknown (+ taxes possible) |
| United States | MakerBright | USD 4.00 | + USD 4.75 (+taxes possible) |
| United States | Vilros | USD 4.00 | + USD 7.95 (+taxes possible) |
| United States | sparkfun | USD 4.00 | + USD 7.77 (+taxes possible) |
| United States | PiShop | USD 4.00 | + USD 8.95 (+taxes possible) |
