The release of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspberry Pi Pico board with RP2040 microcontroller has made big waves these past months in the maker community. Many have demonstrated how especially the two Programmable I/O (PIO) state machine peripherals can be used to create DVI video generators and other digital peripherals.
Alongside this excitement, it raises the question of whether any of this will cause any major upheaval for those of us using STM32, SAM and other Cortex-M based MCUs. Would the RP2040 perhaps be a valid option for some of our projects? With the RP2040 being a dual Cortex-M0+ processor MCU, it seems only fair to put it toe to toe with the offerings from one of the current heavyweights in the 32-bit ARM MCU space: ST Microelectronics.
Did the Raspberry Pi Foundation pipsqueak manage to show ST’s engineers how it’s done, or should the former revisit some of their assumptions? And just how hard is it going to be to port low-level code from STM32 to RP2040?
How Hard Could it Be?
Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040-based board, hooked up to a Raspberry Pi SBC acting as SWD dongle.
Long story short, after the RP2040 caught my eye, I figured it might be interesting to try and port my C++-based STM32 framework to this new MCU. Not so much for the dual Cortex-M0+ cores, though, as I have STM32H7 dual-core (M4 & M7) MCUs lying around which will handily beat the stuffing out of an RP2040 with gobs more I/O to spare. What mostly intrigued me was this state machine peripheral (PIO) in the ..
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