It's interesting that Raspberry Pi is going with both ARM and RISC-V cores in their new Pico boards. I notice the M33 cores are ARMv8, but I have no idea what those RISC V Harvard 3 cores are. Are they 32 bit or 64 bit cores? Does anybody know what those RISCV cores are?
Shoutouts to you Jeff, you've managed to really carve yourself out a niche in a sea of "raspberry pi projects" channels with a unique take. Always come to your coverage first when something new comes out.
This Pi just needs WiFi. It reminds me of when the PiZero was released, so frustrating but they soon released the PiZero W. Hopefully they will do the same here. Otherwise I will have to stick with my ESP8266/ESP32 devices.
ESP8266 provides a serial AT interface to Wi-Fi from the factory and costs $2. $3 if you get one with 3.3V regulator on a breakout board. If you need the GPIO capabilities of the Pi Pico it's still cheaper than most options to just wire an ESP8266 to one of the Pi Pico UARTs. That also takes the burden off the ESP GPIO. Where that could be important is a heavy interrupt environment. Like driving a long bitbanged SPI bus full of LEDs. If you change the LEDs based on callback functions you can find the WiFi interrupts on the ESP preempting your interrupt handler beneath the Arduino app in FreeRTOS because it has realtime priority. What that looks like is a bunch of scrambled LEDs toward the end of your string. For example, a Phillips Hue protocol app that changes the led strip to a solid color will kick back a HTTP 200 response to Alexa the instant the callback returns and potentially scramble your SPI data. If the Pi Pico is driving the LEDs and the ESP is only doing WiFi this problem is easily solved. You don't even need to bitbang SPI on Pi Pico. You've got like 4 separate buses. This thing is an IO beast, really. Anything similar in a single chip, like Teensy, is likely to cost way more than $4 or $7.
@@AugurIliKur Don't bother with the ESP8266, the 96KiB of SRAM isn't enough to do TLS crypto over the internet. It's only useful for connecting to device locally hosted on the same LAN/Wifi segment. Look at TTGO's T8 board for a good inexpensive ESP32-WROVER module with the 8MiB PSRAM. Worth it for $6, and you can do TLS connections, even SSH2. www.aliexpress.com/item/32851423415.html *NO NEW DESIGNS* should be using plaintext protocols past 2020. I'm seriously so sick of warning people off eWeLink and onto tasmota+nodered on a pi. HomeAssistant makes things much easier to deal with, without the ornery cloud connection nonsense. It *IS* possible to get an 8266 talking TLS1.1 in software, but you have to dick around with nginx/apache buffer sizes. It will NOT work with the default 16KB buffers -- you need to drop it to 2KB or 4KB. This also means that it's a nightmare trying to talk to JSON endpoints on existing infrastructure using the defaults, which are not under your control to be able to change. You're just straight up locked out of those. As an example -- take a look at the Lichess client.
It’s meant to be embedded into a larger project board. It would be be hard to add a WiFi chip if you really need it, just grab a spare serial connection.
@@SLLabsKamilion Depends on the use case. E.g.. I can't see why Internet radio must be encrypted. And although the ESP8266 is limited, I have been logging in to Google to get my mail headers and unreadcount using OAuth to login for 2 years now. No dicking around apart from the required dicking around with OAuth. Also here, depends on the use case. But I agree, the ESP32 is a better choice in most cases, just bought 10 ESP32 modules with 8MB PSRAM for 21 dollar on Ali Express ( alsoavaliable at Mouser and Digikey for similar prices)..
Maybe power is one aspect, enabling batter operated use cases. But one of the most important advantages to these microcontrollers is: _no boot time_! They are instantly on. And... you can turn them off just pulling the plug, without thinking about the file system corruption. You can have tighter timings, without unpredictable OS scheduling. ... Also it could be worth mentioning if the USB is OTG (that it has host function), which it seems like it does from the web site.
Honestly, this is why I love the raspberry pi project so much. Yes there are boards out there with much better specs, but software support is in my opinion much better than a few gigs of more RAM or a few MHz faster.
@@Hornet135 I really relate to what you said because I was a victim of that myself (had to make my own I2C LCD library for it in C because there were only ones for Python), but to be honest the documentation for the SDK and the hardware itself is really good
The amount of power you can get on a cheap MCU now days is amazing. I got started with electronics in around 1997. Something like this was a pipe dream back then.
You could probably harvest enough thermal energy from that infant humaniod to run the sensor and wireless node that monitors it's preferred storage temperature...
Its the first video of you I've seen so far and usually I don't sub this fast, but you got me with knowing celsius and fahrenheit as well as with the calm and understandable way of explaining things. I now ill dive deeper into your Channel. Very nice video, greetings from Germany :)
I absolutely appreciate the bloopers at the end, it shows exactly how much effort goes into creating good content. May you have continued successes in life.
@@JeffGeerling I guess whatever program state or variables you declare you have goes into RAM (including emulated NES or whatever ram) and what’s on flash is what a PC emulator process in ram looks like after an NES ROM is loaded but before emulation has begun. I’m just spitballing here. Embedded development is weird. Edit: I guess with 256kb you COULD be able to arbitrarily load some of the smaller 32k NES NROM games into RAM - Mario 1, Excitebike, and have enough for a frame buffer. Uhhh....
Love the pi content but I’ve gotta stop and say thank you for translating Fahrenheit! It shows a principled dedication to making your content really useful.
@@danielh6219 depends on what you do. Software support is great for those, but they have less processing power (though that probably doesn't matter to too many people. 72MHz is plenty for a lot of things.) If you want multiple cores though, I don't know of other boards in the same price range.
@@coreforge esp32 devboard has dual 240mhz cores + additional ultra low power core, supports wifi and bluetooth connectivity, and costs about 4$ on aliexpress
@@nikitoss1108 Yeah, noticed that too. I haven't done much with ESPs in general and haven't looked into the ESP32 since I didn't need wifi for anything.
@@coreforge esp boards looks nice if you write high-level code, but if you try to dive deep into low level coding and write timing-critical things, then better to use another hardware, cause espressif are not so good at writing datasheets
I picked up a couple of these to play with. I'm an EE among lots of other computational trades. Here's the high points for me: - The PIO which is a sort of configurable fabric is neat. I like the PIO assembly language. It's much more user friendly than say the SAM D5x line with their configurable logic ports. - Micropython runs decently fast. It's generally pretty stable in terms of real-timey-ness which is very important for pushing Micro/Circuit Python as a platform. - It's virtually unbrick-able. Though there are some cons: - Having to reboot holding BOOTSEL kinda sucks. These are the sorts of devices that are great to have in rapid prototyping labs where we'll put a few of these on a tray connected to peripherals and use automated tools to push out builds. This makes the programming task almost impossible without manual intervention. It's possible to work around this by shorting the BOOTSEL pin manually, but that's a manual rework to a project board. Not the best. - It feels like the hardware made it to the market before the software did. It's very obvious that the C/C++ side of the development flow didn't reach maturity in time and it's painfully obvious when reading the documentation. As much as I love how the Pi Foundation writes their documentation to look very pretty, it's not as informative as the sorts of documents you'd get in an STM or SAM style document with its raw, almost terse but extremely clear style of explaining things. The toolchain, likewise, is a wild hash of tools. I think it would have benefited them to get this under the Arduino umbrella first, and I hope they move that direction. It feels weird to tell a newbie that I wouldn't recommend a Pi product for beginner programming in C. - As an extension to the last point, lots of the GitHub software examples for the Pico that are officially from the Pi Foundation are riddled with errors, spelling mistakes, poor explanations, and just come off as a huge rush job. Pimoroni and Sparkfun in my view have been holding that mantle a lot higher and their software and extensions are much higher quality. Again, just a weird thing to see from the Pi foundation. - This is very commercial focused comment, but it would be cool if the chip itself could be purchased by itself rather than on a carrier board. If I wanted to integrate this into any of my products, I'd have to split a separate power domain to feed into this board's own power domain. I have a configurable clock generator on board. The RP 2040 is a captivating piece of silicon with real world benefits that have market value to commercial users that their competitors don't have. It would be nice as a vendor to utilize that without the baggage around the chip. For people who comment and say "this is for hobbyists, not business", DigiKey is already taking bulk orders for this thing for commercial use, and it's been communicated at least to me that it's suitable for commercial projects.
Back in the days: yea let him eat that playground sand which has some cat turd in it, it will reinforce his immune system Today: you gotta store your kid at 20-22.2°C to keep it healthy
@@АлексейГриднев-и7р I'm not going to try and claim that the reduction of infant mortality rates isn't a significant factor, but there's also just the way that population curves work involved here.
The esp8266 has most of those features, +wifi and I get them usually at around $2-2.50 a piece for the wemos mini. It's a rediculously capable board, and if you use it in wifi free mode, it's very efficient.
I have a small board the same size as an ESP01 that plugs in and allows it to be powered and breaks out the usable pins. I have it wired up to a DHT22 to monitor temperatures. I also have a variation that has a couple of individually addressable LEDs for indication purposes. For this kind of thing, I'd probably use a PIC though.
The fact that you include your bloopers gives me reassurance that you are not in fact a robot. Thanks for another great video, may the algorithm be with you.
5 seconds is good to have for moving average, especially with sensor inside the chip, it can jump a little or you breathe on it and it would jump too much.
Sure, but if the energy cost of reading the sensor isn’t exorbitant, why _not_ update it that fast? Power still has to be flowing to keep one LED on and run the timer that’s counting the 5 (or 30) seconds.
Yep i get it i get it! In the particular scenario it make sens. But if it was an app notification you may want to have a faster feedback to avoid temperature drop. TLDR: Temperature can drop quickly that is just what I wanted to say.
@@glamax1393 I mean its not like temp down for a minute = baby dead. And I think in a scenario like this a delay of even a minute wouldnt be all that terrible. And sudden drops in Temp in a flat are ussually caused purpoasefully, like opening a window. I get what you're saying, but I think what another commentor mentioned is more important. The Power of the Leds may aswell be much higher than the measuring.
If you haven't seen "pre formed jumpers" for breadboards, I highly suggest looking into it. They're like jumper wires, but shaped like staples, and at different lengths. It makes breadboard projects look so much better. I love the kit I got recently
All those other controllers cost much less (e.g. I used to buy ESP32s for $5) if you don't buy them from stores with high markup. I wonder what the Pi would cost from the same stores.
The one good thing about the Pi distributor network is the stores all charge the list price ($4). The one bad thing about the Pi distributor network is "out of stock" is a common refrain :(
I drove over to the MicroCenter store in nearby Marietta, Georgia and bought a couple Pico boards for US $2 each. It was an introductory promotional price.
And if you do that temperature project with analog components, you'll need 2 op amps (in 1 IC) and some resistors, and it will cost less than 1$, and most part of power consumption will be on LED :) Transistors will do that job as well, but you'll need to spend much more time on tuning.
@@ІванКлимчук-х2фI absolutely agree, but with blue pill and Arduino IDE + DS18B20 it will take an hour or so - comparable to RPi Pico or even less. Including searching for (almost) ready code, because programming blue pill under Arduino IDE is far more popular than RPi Pico. I just want to say that blue pill is more common, more tested and a way cheaper. I don't get what is the niche for this product. "Normal" RPi was stunning project, with MMU that enables to run full Linux with very low cost. RPi Pico has nothing special to offer.
@@megastarling Agree. And (if you didn't that yet) take a look on black pill - it based on STM32F411CEU6 - 100MHz Clock, 512kB Flash, and 128kB RAM, USB-C interface software accessible, 32 I/O, including 14 analog inputs - almost the same, will do the same job for +/- same price - 4$ from AliExpress + 1$ delivery to Ukraine (and btw, you'll never get Pi for 4$, because of same reasons - VAT, shipping, etc).
There is just so many people who can't afford to keep their houses warm. Forty years ago my house dropped into the 40'sF at night and sometimes the water would freeze. I talked to the my son's Pediatrician, he was from England (back then many in England did not have central heating) and told me to keep a hat on him and bundle him up. I made a small sleeping bag for him and he did great so did my next son. When it got to 30F or 40F below they would sleep with us and I would get up and start a fire and my oldest and I would sit by the wood stove until the water thawed out. Times have changed. This is anecdotal but I see that most people don't dress for the cold and then don't dress their children for the cold either. Leading to kid's getting too cold and having health problems including dying. From doing a search about heating in England. The share of households in the UK with central heating systems has increased significantly since 1970, when just 30 percent of households had central heating.Jun 11, 2021
Hey Jeff, congratulations! and thanks for the summary and example project! You mentioned one of the strong points of using the pico was the low power consumption. You might want to consider flashing the LEDs rather than having them on all the time and drawing down the battery. That will let you get longer between charges of the device. You will also have the option of putting the device in sleep mode and waking every 30s - 1 minute to poll the temperature sensor to extend battery - 5s feels a bit aggressive. A final option may be be to turn the sensor on and off explicitly before polling it (with a transistor) to reduce the amount of power the sensor takes when you aren't actively measuring with it but I'm not sure if the sensor needs to be always on to achieve a steady state for correct measurements. Thanks again!
Red Shirt Jeff: 'I still say the remote controlled blowtorch could've accomplished the same thing.' 'You just wanted a remote controlled blowtorch.' RSJ: 'No I don't! Anyway, I had this idea for a night light.' 'NO!' [Congratulations BTW]
Congrats on the new daughter. But I think Redshirt Jeff was on a winner with a microcontroller powered flame torch, because all great science end in explosions!
Magic. Red Shirt Jeff tried explaining it to me but I didn't understand his language. And I had to run away once he started pointing the blowtorch at me.
I'm fortunate to have a Micro Center within minutes from my house; they almost always have stock of all things Pi at list price (often with purchase limits). Sadly, not everyone is as fortunate :(
@@JeffGeerling the only thing I want from the west is microcenter, I always see deals that store only I get jealous since I forward shipment to my country from US since merchants here are greedy and adds 40% of the price as they say it shipment and employment ...etc it all bullshit they get it bulk discount and upcharge us.
I recently used one of these to drive a servo in my diy remote release system for my dji phantom 4. They are really easy to code for especially if you already know python
Congratulations on propagating your lineage yet again :> The extensive documentation is probably nice for 'professionals' - but without WiFi at twice the price (~1.80$ on AliExpress, at least)...the Pico will probably have a hard time competing with the numerous ESP32/8266 devices available.
There are many use cases where a lack of WiFi/BT is a feature, and not something missing. But the Pico has board space... I can imagine a Pico W someday for $10 with WiFi/BT support.
@@JeffGeerling sorry Jeff, but WiFi/BT can be easily disabled in the code, so as long as uC module costs the same or less it does not matter. Also I wanted to mention that STM32-based Arduino Nano-like boards are quite popular and cost less than $3 on AliExpress, so at this price point competition is very hard, which is good. And also IMHO Python is not what one should really use for uC programming. Thanks for vid anyways
@@АлексейДмитриев-ш1ф disregarding ability to run python seems very similar to someone saying a board without wifi is a feature. Its a tool, you can use it or not depending on the needs.
@@JeffGeerling $10 Pico W would be much higher priced than esp8266 or even comparable esp32 dev board. Only way your comment about your argument for lack of Wifi on board is valid argument if you could show case that the power usage is much lower even with Wifi disabled on esp32.
I think the final project is really clear. A kid's bedroom temperature monitor that actuates a blowtorch to heat the room. Today's kids should have the same safety challenges growing up that all us older folks had as kids. Like, don't stand in front of the blow torch on a cold day!
I like your videos and humility dude. Congratulations on your beautiful baby, I am also a young father. With these micro controllers and raspberry PI we're gonna change the world in the positive way. Thanks to Raspberry PI.
Took me a while to figure out how to put the pico into dormant mode. Currently working on a smart door lock but man dropping the power from 5-6ma to around 1.7ma was the key!
You seem to be one of the first people to talk about this brand new device, that needs wireless interfaces in the future, thanks a lot. But to do your project with a microcontroller is quite ridiculous when you could do this below a mA with an analog temperature sensor and a comparator, not accounting the LEDs power consumption, running on a tiny battery for months. But I get the point, you wanted to use the new chip that will shine on complex and time critical circuits.
Hey Jeff, you should look up a sampling technique called compressed sensing. In short, traditional sampling has you collect data at equal intervals (in your case, every 5 seconds), which works provided the temperature change doesn't occur at a frequency higher than 0.1Hz. If instead you randomly sample the temperature probe, you're guaranteed to capture changes in temperature all the way up to half the maximum sampling rate of the ADC. Because you sample at random intervals, you can have a lower average sampling rate, reducing power consumption overall, whilst still ensuring that any temperature changes are witnessed, and ensuring high frequency fluctuations can be measured.
I agree for most thing, but for a microcontroller, why? Micro-USB cables are still cheaper, more common and with a microcontroller, once it's connected, it stays there for a long time, you don't connect and disconnect it every day like a phone, a tablet or maybe a controller.
@@araarathisyomama787 I just hate the connector, I lost a few gadgets and phones due to the poor reliability of it, I know that you're probably using the connection twice (to program it and power it and leave it doing its function) but other than a couple of pi nanos/esps that I bought like 4 years ago I don't want to come anywhere near another micro b cable/connector, with just data+/- and 5v/gnd is really cheap to implement in the same way the micro usb is in this one
@@MrCed122 how much cheaper are they? 50c/cable? I get that this is not going to be plugged and unplugged as much as a phone or any tech gadget but I find micro b really inconvenient to use and going forward is going to be less and less used together with type A, having to look for an otg adapter to plug in a type A-> micro or find a weird micro->C cable in a couple of years when most laptops will probably drop type A is gonna be pretty annoying, my first type C phone is from 2015 (OP2), other than to literally save a few cents in production and to have a slightly smaller connector I see no point for it to exist in 2021, even at this price since you could raise its price to 5 or 6$ and it would still be sold out everywhere for the foreseeable future, it's probably compete with the 0 pricewise too much but it's for a different use case
@@SmallSpoonBrigade "roughly"... always a good thing when it comes to measurements... How about something repeatable, yet very common and easily understandable... like, i dont know, the freezing point of water...
If I ever open the box to my ..... (insert tech device here) Big oooff right there, hit me in the feels. I've got 2 printers that have still been in a box since like September lol, and one of my previous resin printers just sold after sitting a year unused in it's box lol. Don't even get me started on the stuff I bought to build my arcade cabinet 2 years ago lol
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Only one thing I was a little bit disappointed at, no CAN-FD interface. But I sure will find use for a couple of Picos. Congratulations on your newborn!
I'm not familiar with CAN-FD, but it may be possible to interface with the bus using the PIO capabilities of the pico: datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.pdf#section_pio It seems to run directly off of a configurable voltage divider from the system clock, so protocols implemented using PIO should be pretty fast.
the internal temperature sensor is mainly meant for measuring the temperature of the die that can affect things like ADC's or clock stability etc... or just if it's about to explode from overheating. It's not really meant for this application, but if it works... :D
If you think an 8-bit AVR MCU is in any way shape or form comparable to a dual-core 32-bit ARM MCU for any other reason than to point out how they're nowhere the same ballpark, this discussion is not worth having.
@@AttilaAsztalos If an 8 bit micro is sufficient for your hobby project, I think they should be compared. The example in this video could be made with a nano to prove the point.
Nicely done. I am doing the same exact thing but using an Arduino Pro Mini. I haven't heard of the Pico before. I only used the Pi 4 B. Also, Congrats on your daughter mate. Hope you and your loved ones are always healthy and happy.
@@JeffGeerling haha, yeah thing this simple have slipped by me many times, my daughter is 12 now, but no less distracting and disruptive as when she was the size of yours, good luck and congratulations!
Alternative: thermistor, dual op-amp chip as a "window discriminator" (too cold / safe /too hot), 3 leds and a handful of resistors. No computation needed. Yeah, I know, I'm irritatingly old-school. Actually I appreciate that someone starting out with a microcontroller benefits from simple projects and, icing on the cake, your presentation was very good. But, returning to weeping softly in my beer, it's a bit of a shame if people know what a microcontroller is, but never learn about resistors or op-amps.
It's mostly a case of "I started out learning basic circuits / electronics, then ditched all that completely for two decades doing software development..." So now every nail I see I hit with a hammer that's more software-focused :D Having the Pico on hand, though, I'm spending a bit more time going back to basic circuit design again.
The Pico is a TERRIBLE idea because there are thousands of better ARM chips from STM, LPC, TI and many many others. He mentions the Teensy... a much better solution vs the Pico.
I remember when I was in highschool in my country (El Salvador) and microcontrollers had to be programmed with Serial/parallel port programmers and costed $5 a piece. Now we can buy things like the pro micro/nano and the raspberry pico and you don't even need to buy a power supply to start tinkering with them. It's amazing!.
Thank you for introducing us to this new controller. It's amazing how much is packed in this tiny power efficient chip. Nevertheless, I prefer designing an actual circuit for such simple projects. It can be fun too, although a bit more demanding than programming LEDs...
True; this is not a circuit that does much in terms of demonstrating the Pico's power and full feature set. But it is a good 'hello world' type of project to make sure you have everything set up correctly. (I always start with blinking an LED, as do we all :D).
@@JeffGeerling I agree! Do you trust that the chip will never crash? I for one would not trust any micro computer for that purpose without any fail-safe circuit. I've had a commercial digital thermostat freeze once and I noticed because it was getting warmer and warmer in my room.
The Pi ZeroW can be found for $10 on sale and has wifi - so at the expense of more power you could have it network out to alert you - rather than just LED lights that you'd have to watch.
The most bizarre use-case I could come up with for an Arduino microcontroller was when I was contracting overseas in the desert. We lived in these tiny CHUs (Containerized Housing Units) that had windows but they were all sealed up to prevent sand and dust from getting inside. So I built a tiny weather station using an Arduino Mega and had it wirelessly transmit weather data via a 433mhz transceiver breakout board soldered to it. This I mounted on the same antenna tower that our wifi antennas were mounted on and tapped a voltage converter board into the 48v line powering the wifi antenna array to power the Arduino. The whole thing was encased in a small weatherproof plastic box I made sure was the same color of the wifi antennas so as not to stand out too much. OK, weather station up and running...now what? Well, then I built an Arduino-powered custom weather display box for each CHU that had a tiny 2.4" screen on it that would show current weather conditions (temp, humidity, wind speed/direction, light data, and date/time) complete with current weather icons. A small speaker was installed on each box for when wind speeds would exceed 30mph coming from the west which would indicate a sand storm was approaching. If it also suddenly got dark during daytime hours, that too indicated a sand storm was in progress. It worked out well enough and folks seemed to like them. Why Arduino instead of Pis? Simple - cost and robustness. I needed something that could survive the frequent power blackouts we'd have when generators overheated or were cut-over every Sunday morning. A Pi has more of a chance of SD card corruption whereas flashed Arduino microcontroller code doesn't corrupt as easily due to power events. When I built that system I knew jack-all about microcontrollers and only had a high school education. But I could "see" the parts I needed and how to connect them all together in my mind. Writing and testing the wireless bits of the microcontroller code was probably the hardest part of the whole project. I think I may still have that code on an ancient Macbook Air somewhere... Well, that and the long shipping times from Adafruit and Sparkfun being on the Iraq-Kuwait border and all.
Your baby plays football with you while you code something useful on the Pi Pico. Nice! I actually ordered one this morning (hello from Central Europe) and try to look if I can get some of those awesome Arduino projects converted to the Pico at some point. Having a programmable USB keyboard sounds good to me.
I know, the project was just to try out the new gizmo, but zoikes scoob, that's a crazy amount of horsepower for temperature monitoring! Leaf blower for a birthday candle. Btw, to get more accurate temp readings from the on-board sensor, the chip needs to be sleeping during those 5 seconds of inactivity. If it's running then you're heating the sensor.
Re: Your babies life There's a hack for the Arduino that lets it sip power about about 10 micro amps. If you're measuring temperature you don't want your temperature sensor near a device that uses 2 milliamps. It'll get warm & screw up your ambient temperature reading. Your baby's life is worth the extra money and effort to add an I2c temp sensor.
This is exactly what I've been waiting for. Now I can build my own solar-powered handheld! The only problem is that now everyone else can, too, so I probably won't be able to sell it.
I was so exited as i first saw the pico! But the lack of build in wifi is a deal breaker for me... if there was a model for $6 or $8 with wifi i would immediately buy a few...
You should calibrate that thermometer, for example but metal glass on top and measure it's temperature with proper thermometer. This way you'll achieve better accuracy.
Jeff is so deeply interconnected with RaspberryPi that they now produce offspring simultaneously.
@Ayaan Brantley shut up you other bot
Loool :)
Jeff - please let us know when pi5 will be on its way.....xD
It's interesting that Raspberry Pi is going with both ARM and RISC-V cores in their new Pico boards. I notice the M33 cores are ARMv8, but I have no idea what those RISC V Harvard 3 cores are. Are they 32 bit or 64 bit cores? Does anybody know what those RISCV cores are?
in the context of microcontrollers, "RTC" usually means "real time clock" ;)
I thought the same, but in the datasheet. "1 × Timer with 4 alarms, 1 × Real Time Counter"
Pico have inbuilt RTc ?
And SWD stands for 'Single Wire Debug', not 'Serial Wire Debug' ;) source: am using it everyday atm
@@artvandelay777 In the RP2040 datasheet it actually says real time clock at the start of chapter 4.8.
@@henriburau6293 Yep. I noticed that after I posted. "Real Time Counter" is from the pico datasheet.
Shoutouts to you Jeff, you've managed to really carve yourself out a niche in a sea of "raspberry pi projects" channels with a unique take. Always come to your coverage first when something new comes out.
Bloop reel at the end 😂😂😂 “this is like take 27, I am not even joking”
I love you man🤗
baby life lol
This Pi just needs WiFi. It reminds me of when the PiZero was released, so frustrating but they soon released the PiZero W. Hopefully they will do the same here. Otherwise I will have to stick with my ESP8266/ESP32 devices.
I'm hoping for the same!
ESP8266 provides a serial AT interface to Wi-Fi from the factory and costs $2. $3 if you get one with 3.3V regulator on a breakout board. If you need the GPIO capabilities of the Pi Pico it's still cheaper than most options to just wire an ESP8266 to one of the Pi Pico UARTs. That also takes the burden off the ESP GPIO. Where that could be important is a heavy interrupt environment. Like driving a long bitbanged SPI bus full of LEDs. If you change the LEDs based on callback functions you can find the WiFi interrupts on the ESP preempting your interrupt handler beneath the Arduino app in FreeRTOS because it has realtime priority. What that looks like is a bunch of scrambled LEDs toward the end of your string. For example, a Phillips Hue protocol app that changes the led strip to a solid color will kick back a HTTP 200 response to Alexa the instant the callback returns and potentially scramble your SPI data. If the Pi Pico is driving the LEDs and the ESP is only doing WiFi this problem is easily solved. You don't even need to bitbang SPI on Pi Pico. You've got like 4 separate buses. This thing is an IO beast, really. Anything similar in a single chip, like Teensy, is likely to cost way more than $4 or $7.
@@AugurIliKur Don't bother with the ESP8266, the 96KiB of SRAM isn't enough to do TLS crypto over the internet. It's only useful for connecting to device locally hosted on the same LAN/Wifi segment. Look at TTGO's T8 board for a good inexpensive ESP32-WROVER module with the 8MiB PSRAM. Worth it for $6, and you can do TLS connections, even SSH2.
www.aliexpress.com/item/32851423415.html
*NO NEW DESIGNS* should be using plaintext protocols past 2020. I'm seriously so sick of warning people off eWeLink and onto tasmota+nodered on a pi. HomeAssistant makes things much easier to deal with, without the ornery cloud connection nonsense. It *IS* possible to get an 8266 talking TLS1.1 in software, but you have to dick around with nginx/apache buffer sizes. It will NOT work with the default 16KB buffers -- you need to drop it to 2KB or 4KB. This also means that it's a nightmare trying to talk to JSON endpoints on existing infrastructure using the defaults, which are not under your control to be able to change. You're just straight up locked out of those. As an example -- take a look at the Lichess client.
It’s meant to be embedded into a larger project board. It would be be hard to add a WiFi chip if you really need it, just grab a spare serial connection.
@@SLLabsKamilion Depends on the use case. E.g.. I can't see why Internet radio must be encrypted. And although the ESP8266 is limited, I have been logging in to Google to get my mail headers and unreadcount using OAuth to login for 2 years now. No dicking around apart from the required dicking around with OAuth. Also here, depends on the use case. But I agree, the ESP32 is a better choice in most cases, just bought 10 ESP32 modules with 8MB PSRAM for 21 dollar on Ali Express ( alsoavaliable at Mouser and Digikey for similar prices)..
Maybe power is one aspect, enabling batter operated use cases. But one of the most important advantages to these microcontrollers is: _no boot time_! They are instantly on. And... you can turn them off just pulling the plug, without thinking about the file system corruption. You can have tighter timings, without unpredictable OS scheduling. ...
Also it could be worth mentioning if the USB is OTG (that it has host function), which it seems like it does from the web site.
Honestly, this is why I love the raspberry pi project so much. Yes there are boards out there with much better specs, but software support is in my opinion much better than a few gigs of more RAM or a few MHz faster.
People always dismissing the value of documentation and support then wonder why companies don't put more effort into docs and support lol.
It’s weird that you say that when this has less software support than most anything else out there right now.
@@Hornet135 I really relate to what you said because I was a victim of that myself (had to make my own I2C LCD library for it in C because there were only ones for Python), but to be honest the documentation for the SDK and the hardware itself is really good
Like your out-takes 🤓 Congratulation „Dad“, take care of your family. Regards Peter
The amount of power you can get on a cheap MCU now days is amazing. I got started with electronics in around 1997. Something like this was a pipe dream back then.
That's what I keep thinking to myself. ESP32, all the Teensy boards, now this? We are truly spoiled for choice.
You could probably harvest enough thermal energy from that infant humaniod to run the sensor and wireless node that monitors it's preferred storage temperature...
Its the first video of you I've seen so far and usually I don't sub this fast, but you got me with knowing celsius and fahrenheit as well as with the calm and understandable way of explaining things. I now ill dive deeper into your Channel. Very nice video, greetings from Germany :)
Dito
I absolutely appreciate the bloopers at the end, it shows exactly how much effort goes into creating good content. May you have continued successes in life.
I'm so glad you like them! I figure otherwise I recorded all the extra footage for no reason at all!
Congrats Jeff on being dad.
We are grateful to have your content on TH-cam.
All I think is: dual core 133MHz should be MORE than enough to run Doom...
Wouldn't be more efficient to make one core run doom and the other one process VGA signals?
Doesn’t have the ram
Someone (SparkFun?) already has a little handheld emulator in the works 🤪
@@JeffGeerling I guess whatever program state or variables you declare you have goes into RAM (including emulated NES or whatever ram) and what’s on flash is what a PC emulator process in ram looks like after an NES ROM is loaded but before emulation has begun. I’m just spitballing here. Embedded development is weird.
Edit: I guess with 256kb you COULD be able to arbitrarily load some of the smaller 32k NES NROM games into RAM - Mario 1, Excitebike, and have enough for a frame buffer. Uhhh....
@@johnsimon8457 you can hook up an external RAM chip
UWU this is a good content plus that chapter so everyone can navigate the vid easily.
CONGRATS HAVING A BABY!
I'm glad to see that other tab where it has a C / C++ option. It's good to have a real programming language available.
They are both real programming languages for different purposes...
I'd definitely use C since I know it already but they are all real programming languages.
If it’s not assembly, it’s not real. If you wanna be elitist, at least go full elitist.
@@Hornet135 y'all use languages? Punch cards are still the OG way to program.
Best short review I saw in the past 48 hours right after launch!
Outstanding. This is one of your best videos.
Love the pi content but I’ve gotta stop and say thank you for translating Fahrenheit! It shows a principled dedication to making your content really useful.
Check out a $2 "Blue pill" board based on stm32
It’s a better deal
@@danielh6219 depends on what you do. Software support is great for those, but they have less processing power (though that probably doesn't matter to too many people. 72MHz is plenty for a lot of things.) If you want multiple cores though, I don't know of other boards in the same price range.
@@coreforge esp32 devboard has dual 240mhz cores + additional ultra low power core, supports wifi and bluetooth connectivity, and costs about 4$ on aliexpress
@@nikitoss1108 Yeah, noticed that too. I haven't done much with ESPs in general and haven't looked into the ESP32 since I didn't need wifi for anything.
@@coreforge esp boards looks nice if you write high-level code, but if you try to dive deep into low level coding and write timing-critical things, then better to use another hardware, cause espressif are not so good at writing datasheets
I picked up a couple of these to play with. I'm an EE among lots of other computational trades. Here's the high points for me:
- The PIO which is a sort of configurable fabric is neat. I like the PIO assembly language. It's much more user friendly than say the SAM D5x line with their configurable logic ports.
- Micropython runs decently fast. It's generally pretty stable in terms of real-timey-ness which is very important for pushing Micro/Circuit Python as a platform.
- It's virtually unbrick-able.
Though there are some cons:
- Having to reboot holding BOOTSEL kinda sucks. These are the sorts of devices that are great to have in rapid prototyping labs where we'll put a few of these on a tray connected to peripherals and use automated tools to push out builds. This makes the programming task almost impossible without manual intervention. It's possible to work around this by shorting the BOOTSEL pin manually, but that's a manual rework to a project board. Not the best.
- It feels like the hardware made it to the market before the software did. It's very obvious that the C/C++ side of the development flow didn't reach maturity in time and it's painfully obvious when reading the documentation. As much as I love how the Pi Foundation writes their documentation to look very pretty, it's not as informative as the sorts of documents you'd get in an STM or SAM style document with its raw, almost terse but extremely clear style of explaining things. The toolchain, likewise, is a wild hash of tools. I think it would have benefited them to get this under the Arduino umbrella first, and I hope they move that direction. It feels weird to tell a newbie that I wouldn't recommend a Pi product for beginner programming in C.
- As an extension to the last point, lots of the GitHub software examples for the Pico that are officially from the Pi Foundation are riddled with errors, spelling mistakes, poor explanations, and just come off as a huge rush job. Pimoroni and Sparkfun in my view have been holding that mantle a lot higher and their software and extensions are much higher quality. Again, just a weird thing to see from the Pi foundation.
- This is very commercial focused comment, but it would be cool if the chip itself could be purchased by itself rather than on a carrier board. If I wanted to integrate this into any of my products, I'd have to split a separate power domain to feed into this board's own power domain. I have a configurable clock generator on board. The RP 2040 is a captivating piece of silicon with real world benefits that have market value to commercial users that their competitors don't have. It would be nice as a vendor to utilize that without the baggage around the chip. For people who comment and say "this is for hobbyists, not business", DigiKey is already taking bulk orders for this thing for commercial use, and it's been communicated at least to me that it's suitable for commercial projects.
Back in the days: yea let him eat that playground sand which has some cat turd in it, it will reinforce his immune system
Today: you gotta store your kid at 20-22.2°C to keep it healthy
I’m sorry I just HAD to let you know that I’ve been dying over the phrasing of “store your kid” for several minutes now 😄
One wonders how the human race made it this far without today's medical professionals.
@@charetjc well, it's not a coincidence that the world population exploded only 100 years ago
I know right?!
@@АлексейГриднев-и7р I'm not going to try and claim that the reduction of infant mortality rates isn't a significant factor, but there's also just the way that population curves work involved here.
baby girls are awesome.. congrats on the new addition Jeff. keep up the great work.
@Robert Slackware sigh.. so I have 9 years till things get real bad.. I just hope I can remember all the good times when the nightmares start.
The esp8266 has most of those features, +wifi and I get them usually at around $2-2.50 a piece for the wemos mini. It's a rediculously capable board, and if you use it in wifi free mode, it's very efficient.
I have a small board the same size as an ESP01 that plugs in and allows it to be powered and breaks out the usable pins. I have it wired up to a DHT22 to monitor temperatures. I also have a variation that has a couple of individually addressable LEDs for indication purposes. For this kind of thing, I'd probably use a PIC though.
The fact that you include your bloopers gives me reassurance that you are not in fact a robot. Thanks for another great video, may the algorithm be with you.
May the algorithm be with you, too! Thanks for feeding it with your comment :D
5 seconds sleep time between reads is rather low, temperature doesnt change so fast. 30 seconds or Even longer is more reasonable imo.
5 seconds is good to have for moving average, especially with sensor inside the chip, it can jump a little or you breathe on it and it would jump too much.
I mean what about a door or a window left open? :D (just sayin' ...)
Sure, but if the energy cost of reading the sensor isn’t exorbitant, why _not_ update it that fast? Power still has to be flowing to keep one LED on and run the timer that’s counting the 5 (or 30) seconds.
Yep i get it i get it! In the particular scenario it make sens. But if it was an app notification you may want to have a faster feedback to avoid temperature drop. TLDR: Temperature can drop quickly that is just what I wanted to say.
@@glamax1393 I mean its not like temp down for a minute = baby dead. And I think in a scenario like this a delay of even a minute wouldnt be all that terrible. And sudden drops in Temp in a flat are ussually caused purpoasefully, like opening a window. I get what you're saying, but I think what another commentor mentioned is more important. The Power of the Leds may aswell be much higher than the measuring.
If you haven't seen "pre formed jumpers" for breadboards, I highly suggest looking into it. They're like jumper wires, but shaped like staples, and at different lengths. It makes breadboard projects look so much better. I love the kit I got recently
All those other controllers cost much less (e.g. I used to buy ESP32s for $5) if you don't buy them from stores with high markup. I wonder what the Pi would cost from the same stores.
The one good thing about the Pi distributor network is the stores all charge the list price ($4). The one bad thing about the Pi distributor network is "out of stock" is a common refrain :(
@@JeffGeerling Unfortunately for hardware I think 2020 and 2021 will be "Years of out-of-stock" in general.
I drove over to the MicroCenter store in nearby Marietta, Georgia and bought a couple Pico boards for US $2 each. It was an introductory promotional price.
Great job Jeff! You have a great delivery. Congratulations on baby #2! Now you’re a “professional parent”; welcome to the club.
Heh... this was #4!
10:53 When you fail the captcha too many times
Congrats for the baby!
Thank you!
This is THE “Room Temperature” room
Ah yes lets go to the ROOM TEMPERATURE
can't feel my pants
Congrats🎉🎉I just had a daughter also 7 months yesterday. It's our first. When I heard about SIDS I didn't sleep for a couple days lol
"Sudden keep parent awake syndrome"
Great video ! The only thing I miss is the comparison to the "blue pill" - STM32F103 board which costs less than $ 2.
And if you do that temperature project with analog components, you'll need 2 op amps (in 1 IC) and some resistors, and it will cost less than 1$, and most part of power consumption will be on LED :)
Transistors will do that job as well, but you'll need to spend much more time on tuning.
@@ІванКлимчук-х2фI absolutely agree, but with blue pill and Arduino IDE + DS18B20 it will take an hour or so - comparable to RPi Pico or even less. Including searching for (almost) ready code, because programming blue pill under Arduino IDE is far more popular than RPi Pico.
I just want to say that blue pill is more common, more tested and a way cheaper. I don't get what is the niche for this product. "Normal" RPi was stunning project, with MMU that enables to run full Linux with very low cost. RPi Pico has nothing special to offer.
@@megastarling Agree. And (if you didn't that yet) take a look on black pill - it based on STM32F411CEU6 - 100MHz Clock, 512kB Flash, and 128kB RAM, USB-C interface software accessible, 32 I/O, including 14 analog inputs - almost the same, will do the same job for +/- same price - 4$ from AliExpress + 1$ delivery to Ukraine (and btw, you'll never get Pi for 4$, because of same reasons - VAT, shipping, etc).
@@ІванКлимчук-х2ф Thanks, I will definitely look at it. Params looks very promising.
There is just so many people who can't afford to keep their houses warm. Forty years ago my house dropped into the 40'sF at night and sometimes the water would freeze. I talked to the my son's Pediatrician, he was from England (back then many in England did not have central heating) and told me to keep a hat on him and bundle him up. I made a small sleeping bag for him and he did great so did my next son. When it got to 30F or 40F below they would sleep with us and I would get up and start a fire and my oldest and I would sit by the wood stove until the water thawed out. Times have changed. This is anecdotal but I see that most people don't dress for the cold and then don't dress their children for the cold either. Leading to kid's getting too cold and having health problems including dying. From doing a search about heating in England. The share of households in the UK with central heating systems has increased significantly since 1970, when just 30 percent of households had central heating.Jun 11, 2021
"Is that another grey hair?" I felt that.
My hairline is receding and I'm only three decades into life. You old people with hair are lucky SOBs.
@@bluephreakr
Hey, I haven't even got to the third season, I'm grey AND receding!
saw the news for the Pi Pico opened TH-cam to look for Jeff's video covering it to see what it's all about, love the bloopers and thanks for the video
Getting kids in order to have a Pi Project, now that's hardcore !
Hey Jeff, congratulations! and thanks for the summary and example project!
You mentioned one of the strong points of using the pico was the low power consumption. You might want to consider flashing the LEDs rather than having them on all the time and drawing down the battery. That will let you get longer between charges of the device. You will also have the option of putting the device in sleep mode and waking every 30s - 1 minute to poll the temperature sensor to extend battery - 5s feels a bit aggressive. A final option may be be to turn the sensor on and off explicitly before polling it (with a transistor) to reduce the amount of power the sensor takes when you aren't actively measuring with it but I'm not sure if the sensor needs to be always on to achieve a steady state for correct measurements.
Thanks again!
Red Shirt Jeff: 'I still say the remote controlled blowtorch could've accomplished the same thing.'
'You just wanted a remote controlled blowtorch.'
RSJ: 'No I don't! Anyway, I had this idea for a night light.'
'NO!'
[Congratulations BTW]
He has a few GPIO pins left. Should be able to squeeze out a nightlight too. LDR , resistor and an another LED.
@@mikehensley78 I think Red Shirt Jeff might have had a 'blowtorch as a night light' idea brewing.
@@CFWhitman if the room got too cold the blow torch could ignite and warm it up. it would also need an RGB LED for style and horsepower.
Probably a green blowtorch, a blue blowtorch and a red blowtorch, hmmm sounds like a nice idea.
I love the tldw section at the beginning
Congrats on the new daughter. But I think Redshirt Jeff was on a winner with a microcontroller powered flame torch, because all great science end in explosions!
Congratulations! New ones are a joy. I am going to get one of these!
How come your video comes out at the same time as the raspberry pi foundation?
Imma watch ur video first tho
Magic. Red Shirt Jeff tried explaining it to me but I didn't understand his language. And I had to run away once he started pointing the blowtorch at me.
@@JeffGeerling Re-model the Bell Slapper to keep slapping him everytime he turns on the blowtorch :)
@@JeffGeerling
Is there any chance that this processor is designed for the Fantasy Pico-8 system?
@@SLLabsKamilion Thanks. That satisfied my curiosity.
@@coda821 No problem; hope you have some enjoyable times :)
Always enjoy your videos Jeff! Keep em' coming!
$4 dollar yaah, let me check now and it's not available outside us. Will wait and see it 20$ in a month
or 4 USD + 15.99 shipping
Raspberry pi zero costs 40 dollars in my country. It's like a joke
just look at the original zero, and how easy, i mean hard to get
I'm fortunate to have a Micro Center within minutes from my house; they almost always have stock of all things Pi at list price (often with purchase limits). Sadly, not everyone is as fortunate :(
@@JeffGeerling the only thing I want from the west is microcenter, I always see deals that store only I get jealous since I forward shipment to my country from US since merchants here are greedy and adds 40% of the price as they say it shipment and employment ...etc it all bullshit they get it bulk discount and upcharge us.
Congrats on your new 20+ year project! 🥰
I've never felt so grateful towards any development board manufacturer... :')
Hope they come out with a WiFi version. For my iot projects I need to connect to my mqtt server for anything to be useful.
Just use an ESP32-PICO...?
I recently used one of these to drive a servo in my diy remote release system for my dji phantom 4. They are really easy to code for especially if you already know python
I wish they would make a version with wifi+bluetooth. I'd replace the ESP32 in a heartbeat.
I bet they plan to have one very soon.
Most likely the chip will go where the R Pi logo is now.
@@AtlantaTerry I'd totally buy it, both for price and for less awful documentation and hopefully software.
Kind of eerie. Been researching microcontrollers and micropython for a home project. Thanks again Jeff!
Congratulations on propagating your lineage yet again :>
The extensive documentation is probably nice for 'professionals' - but without WiFi at twice the price (~1.80$ on AliExpress, at least)...the Pico will probably have a hard time competing with the numerous ESP32/8266 devices available.
There are many use cases where a lack of WiFi/BT is a feature, and not something missing.
But the Pico has board space... I can imagine a Pico W someday for $10 with WiFi/BT support.
@@JeffGeerling sorry Jeff, but WiFi/BT can be easily disabled in the code, so as long as uC module costs the same or less it does not matter. Also I wanted to mention that STM32-based Arduino Nano-like boards are quite popular and cost less than $3 on AliExpress, so at this price point competition is very hard, which is good. And also IMHO Python is not what one should really use for uC programming. Thanks for vid anyways
@@АлексейДмитриев-ш1ф disregarding ability to run python seems very similar to someone saying a board without wifi is a feature. Its a tool, you can use it or not depending on the needs.
@@JeffGeerling $10 Pico W would be much higher priced than esp8266 or even comparable esp32 dev board.
Only way your comment about your argument for lack of Wifi on board is valid argument if you could show case that the power usage is much lower even with Wifi disabled on esp32.
@@maciejurbanski6146 thanks for the explanation. How could I miss that I can use or not Python? I think that's why there was 'IMHO' word.
I think the final project is really clear. A kid's bedroom temperature monitor that actuates a blowtorch to heat the room. Today's kids should have the same safety challenges growing up that all us older folks had as kids. Like, don't stand in front of the blow torch on a cold day!
I like your style.
What's stopping you from soldering the header pins on the top and putting it in a breadboard upside down?
Yes, then just wire the switch into the board externally.
Thanks for the great idea with temperature monitor. I built it up and it works wonderfully.
What? I wasn't wondering why you're cooking your kids, it's 'murica, you do all kinds of crazy stuff.
I like your videos and humility dude. Congratulations on your beautiful baby, I am also a young father. With these micro controllers and raspberry PI we're gonna change the world in the positive way. Thanks to Raspberry PI.
what 22 degrees celcius? in my country just reach 22 degrees and mount everest memes will come out
Australia? 22c is like winter on the mid east coast.
Here 22 is *COLD*
Water freezes at 0, room temp ~20, body temp ~26 , water boils at 100.
The only temperature scale worth using is where zero means zero.
That’s 295K to you.
@@Sovvyy add 11 to the body temp, unless it's about a recent corpse ;)
Took me a while to figure out how to put the pico into dormant mode. Currently working on a smart door lock but man dropping the power from 5-6ma to around 1.7ma was the key!
You seem to be one of the first people to talk about this brand new device, that needs wireless interfaces in the future, thanks a lot. But to do your project with a microcontroller is quite ridiculous when you could do this below a mA with an analog temperature sensor and a comparator, not accounting the LEDs power consumption, running on a tiny battery for months. But I get the point, you wanted to use the new chip that will shine on complex and time critical circuits.
Lol Jeff, I have kids too.. there just isn't time to do fun projects eh?
Hey Jeff, you should look up a sampling technique called compressed sensing. In short, traditional sampling has you collect data at equal intervals (in your case, every 5 seconds), which works provided the temperature change doesn't occur at a frequency higher than 0.1Hz. If instead you randomly sample the temperature probe, you're guaranteed to capture changes in temperature all the way up to half the maximum sampling rate of the ADC.
Because you sample at random intervals, you can have a lower average sampling rate, reducing power consumption overall, whilst still ensuring that any temperature changes are witnessed, and ensuring high frequency fluctuations can be measured.
I'd pay twice just to have type C, micro usb has to die already
for what purpose would you need anything more than a cheap usb 2.0 on this little thing? I'm half doubtful, half curious btw
I agree for most thing, but for a microcontroller, why? Micro-USB cables are still cheaper, more common and with a microcontroller, once it's connected, it stays there for a long time, you don't connect and disconnect it every day like a phone, a tablet or maybe a controller.
@@araarathisyomama787 I just hate the connector, I lost a few gadgets and phones due to the poor reliability of it, I know that you're probably using the connection twice (to program it and power it and leave it doing its function) but other than a couple of pi nanos/esps that I bought like 4 years ago I don't want to come anywhere near another micro b cable/connector, with just data+/- and 5v/gnd is really cheap to implement in the same way the micro usb is in this one
@@MrCed122 how much cheaper are they? 50c/cable? I get that this is not going to be plugged and unplugged as much as a phone or any tech gadget but I find micro b really inconvenient to use and going forward is going to be less and less used together with type A, having to look for an otg adapter to plug in a type A-> micro or find a weird micro->C cable in a couple of years when most laptops will probably drop type A is gonna be pretty annoying, my first type C phone is from 2015 (OP2), other than to literally save a few cents in production and to have a slightly smaller connector I see no point for it to exist in 2021, even at this price since you could raise its price to 5 or 6$ and it would still be sold out everywhere for the foreseeable future, it's probably compete with the 0 pricewise too much but it's for a different use case
You can also buy an esp32f401/f411 board with type C for $3
congrats on the baby!
Fahrenheit was born in Gdansk, Poland (Germany at that time). We're sorry, Murica.....
Why? Celsius is even worse. At last Fahrenheit puts one end roughly at body temperature and has roughly 4x the revolution.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade "roughly"... always a good thing when it comes to measurements...
How about something repeatable, yet very common and easily understandable... like, i dont know, the freezing point of water...
If I ever open the box to my ..... (insert tech device here)
Big oooff right there, hit me in the feels. I've got 2 printers that have still been in a box since like September lol, and one of my previous resin printers just sold after sitting a year unused in it's box lol. Don't even get me started on the stuff I bought to build my arcade cabinet 2 years ago lol
Only one thing I was a little bit disappointed at, no CAN-FD interface. But I sure will find use for a couple of Picos. Congratulations on your newborn!
I'm not familiar with CAN-FD, but it may be possible to interface with the bus using the PIO capabilities of the pico:
datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040_datasheet.pdf#section_pio
It seems to run directly off of a configurable voltage divider from the system clock, so protocols implemented using PIO should be pretty fast.
$4 pi? By the time it gets to Canada it will be more like $40
Friends in the states can mail you some in a birthday card.
the internal temperature sensor is mainly meant for measuring the temperature of the die that can affect things like ADC's or clock stability etc... or just if it's about to explode from overheating. It's not really meant for this application, but if it works... :D
"If it works, it ships!" 🤪
This could be compared to arduino nano, which is already kind of obsolete with availabiliy of ESP32. So, I dont really understand this product.
Arduino nano knockoffs are so cheap they are still viable if you just need a simple microcontroller. It's about 2 euro on Aliexpress.
The nano has definitely less features than this device.
If you think an 8-bit AVR MCU is in any way shape or form comparable to a dual-core 32-bit ARM MCU for any other reason than to point out how they're nowhere the same ballpark, this discussion is not worth having.
Ok fine, its ARM, but still, i dont see a point using this over lets say ESP32. What am I missing?
@@AttilaAsztalos If an 8 bit micro is sufficient for your hobby project, I think they should be compared. The example in this video could be made with a nano to prove the point.
Nicely done. I am doing the same exact thing but using an Arduino Pro Mini. I haven't heard of the Pico before. I only used the Pi 4 B.
Also, Congrats on your daughter mate. Hope you and your loved ones are always healthy and happy.
Atfirst I thought you misspoke when you said it can produce DVI output, (05:51).. but then I found this github.com/Wren6991/picodvi
The new Arduino Nano is using the RP2040 as well which is exciting.
Is it? store.arduino.cc/arduino-nano
@@Schwuuuuup the new one isn't released yet. It will be cashed the Arduino nano RP2040
Anyone else thinking... "Solder the pin header to the other side of the board" so that the pin labels face up?
Apparently many people have thought about doing that... except for me. D'oh!
@@JeffGeerling haha, yeah thing this simple have slipped by me many times, my daughter is 12 now, but no less distracting and disruptive as when she was the size of yours, good luck and congratulations!
Congratulations for the baby : )
Me: 68°? Dang, that kid is well done!
Jeff: * actually addresses the possibility of those jokes *
Me: Huh? * *surprised Picachu face* *
Alternative: thermistor, dual op-amp chip as a "window discriminator" (too cold / safe /too hot), 3 leds and a handful of resistors. No computation needed. Yeah, I know, I'm irritatingly old-school. Actually I appreciate that someone starting out with a microcontroller benefits from simple projects and, icing on the cake, your presentation was very good. But, returning to weeping softly in my beer, it's a bit of a shame if people know what a microcontroller is, but never learn about resistors or op-amps.
It's mostly a case of "I started out learning basic circuits / electronics, then ditched all that completely for two decades doing software development..."
So now every nail I see I hit with a hammer that's more software-focused :D
Having the Pico on hand, though, I'm spending a bit more time going back to basic circuit design again.
it needs wireless connectivity, anything less and is nearly useless.
Soon.
Who needs a high clock speed if you don't have wifi / ble?
The Pico is a TERRIBLE idea because there are thousands of better ARM chips from STM, LPC, TI and many many others. He mentions the Teensy... a much better solution vs the Pico.
So I just saw this pop up in my TH-cam feed again.
I was like “Wow, it’s been 3 years?”
Jeff, A baby that small NEEDS her neck supported.
👍👍congratulations for a deep explanation 🎉🎉 expecting more projects and tutorials from you.
I remember when I was in highschool in my country (El Salvador) and microcontrollers had to be programmed with Serial/parallel port programmers and costed $5 a piece.
Now we can buy things like the pro micro/nano and the raspberry pico and you don't even need to buy a power supply to start tinkering with them. It's amazing!.
Thanks for the celsius conversion.
Thank you for introducing us to this new controller. It's amazing how much is packed in this tiny power efficient chip. Nevertheless, I prefer designing an actual circuit for such simple projects. It can be fun too, although a bit more demanding than programming LEDs...
True; this is not a circuit that does much in terms of demonstrating the Pico's power and full feature set. But it is a good 'hello world' type of project to make sure you have everything set up correctly. (I always start with blinking an LED, as do we all :D).
@@JeffGeerling I agree!
Do you trust that the chip will never crash? I for one would not trust any micro computer for that purpose without any fail-safe circuit. I've had a commercial digital thermostat freeze once and I noticed because it was getting warmer and warmer in my room.
Congrartz on the girl !!!
Im getting my esp32 for 3-4 USD in packs of 25 on ali..
The Pi ZeroW can be found for $10 on sale and has wifi - so at the expense of more power you could have it network out to alert you - rather than just LED lights that you'd have to watch.
Amen to the pin label thing, that bugs me to. Apart from that, I like the pico a lot, too.
I wish all guys from the US would speak that clearly and well-paced. anyway, any recommendation for a similar unit coming with zigbee?
The most bizarre use-case I could come up with for an Arduino microcontroller was when I was contracting overseas in the desert.
We lived in these tiny CHUs (Containerized Housing Units) that had windows but they were all sealed up to prevent sand and dust from getting inside.
So I built a tiny weather station using an Arduino Mega and had it wirelessly transmit weather data via a 433mhz transceiver breakout board soldered to it. This I mounted on the same antenna tower that our wifi antennas were mounted on and tapped a voltage converter board into the 48v line powering the wifi antenna array to power the Arduino. The whole thing was encased in a small weatherproof plastic box I made sure was the same color of the wifi antennas so as not to stand out too much.
OK, weather station up and running...now what?
Well, then I built an Arduino-powered custom weather display box for each CHU that had a tiny 2.4" screen on it that would show current weather conditions (temp, humidity, wind speed/direction, light data, and date/time) complete with current weather icons. A small speaker was installed on each box for when wind speeds would exceed 30mph coming from the west which would indicate a sand storm was approaching. If it also suddenly got dark during daytime hours, that too indicated a sand storm was in progress. It worked out well enough and folks seemed to like them.
Why Arduino instead of Pis? Simple - cost and robustness. I needed something that could survive the frequent power blackouts we'd have when generators overheated or were cut-over every Sunday morning. A Pi has more of a chance of SD card corruption whereas flashed Arduino microcontroller code doesn't corrupt as easily due to power events.
When I built that system I knew jack-all about microcontrollers and only had a high school education. But I could "see" the parts I needed and how to connect them all together in my mind. Writing and testing the wireless bits of the microcontroller code was probably the hardest part of the whole project. I think I may still have that code on an ancient Macbook Air somewhere...
Well, that and the long shipping times from Adafruit and Sparkfun being on the Iraq-Kuwait border and all.
Your baby plays football with you while you code something useful on the Pi Pico. Nice!
I actually ordered one this morning (hello from Central Europe) and try to look if I can get some of those awesome Arduino projects converted to the Pico at some point.
Having a programmable USB keyboard sounds good to me.
This thing absolutely bodies the atmega328p, I need one.
I know, the project was just to try out the new gizmo, but zoikes scoob, that's a crazy amount of horsepower for temperature monitoring! Leaf blower for a birthday candle.
Btw, to get more accurate temp readings from the on-board sensor, the chip needs to be sleeping during those 5 seconds of inactivity. If it's running then you're heating the sensor.
Congrats on first time dad. I never knew about the temp for baby.
Re: Your babies life
There's a hack for the Arduino that lets it sip power about about 10 micro amps. If you're measuring temperature you don't want your temperature sensor near a device that uses 2 milliamps. It'll get warm & screw up your ambient temperature reading. Your baby's life is worth the extra money and effort to add an I2c temp sensor.
Nice image from your camera and recording setup. kudos.
This is exactly what I've been waiting for. Now I can build my own solar-powered handheld! The only problem is that now everyone else can, too, so I probably won't be able to sell it.
I was so exited as i first saw the pico! But the lack of build in wifi is a deal breaker for me... if there was a model for $6 or $8 with wifi i would immediately buy a few...
You should calibrate that thermometer, for example but metal glass on top and measure it's temperature with proper thermometer. This way you'll achieve better accuracy.
Speaking of "Murica units"...