Re: New Pico2

Just the "pirate brand" boards for now, official boards on pre-order, but i prefer USB-C to the official ones with micro-B

RP2040 is 644 pages, is the extra all accounted for by RISC-V info? Regardless, SumatraPDF viewer whizzes through the pages

The days of fitting an instruction set on a page or two are long gone.

I liked the irony implied (or is it just me?) by wrapping that word. WYSi WYG!

The RISCV instruction set for the cores in the Pico is just 137. It's all in a table on one page in the rp2350 datasheet.

These days, when you've got a 1K+ page manual you know it's the actual manual. If it's 10 pages it's just a 'product brief' that shows some basic information about the chip but not nearly enough to program it (contact the OEM and they'll make you sign an NDA for the actual details, and maybe only if you're going to buy a million units).

Most of the time you can ignore huge chunks of the manual - if you never use the CAN bus transceiver, skip that section. But better to have the information there if you need it.

Theo

read the part on how the build in buck converter needs a custom inductor with polarity marking to work, and tell there is something seriously wrong with it

As long as the silicon errata sheet isn’t 1000 pages!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Actually the "Product Brief" is 25 pages.

That reminds me of only Intel's attempt at an ARM design; they were tasked with updating the Strong ARM, instead they made the XScale which was a complete dog of a core, and the errata alone was almost the size of the complete SA110 manual.

---druck

When it comes to bugs in chips, Intel certainly have form.

David

I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.

The polarized inducor is strange. I'd expect that a small shielded inductor would work fine. It is interesting to have a switching regulator on a CPU chip... near a 12-bit ADC!

The Pi designs struggle to save pennies and microwatts, which not all of us care about.

I've had buck converters sensitive to inductor orientation before. Last time was with MIC4576 It was sensitive to the orientation of an inductor with the winding horizontal, similar to that shown in the RP2350 data. But the inductor had no polarity markings. It was changed to a stand up toroid which had no orientation issues.

There are products other than the Raspberry Pi available for those with more money to thr^H^H^Hspend.

I like the Pi for more reasons than the cost. The chips have long-term availability guarentees, the documentation is excellent, and there are zillions of kids out there who are familiar with the Pi culture.

Even ignoring the 70 cent price, the RP2040 is an amazing part.

I agree. Being able to build a wifi connected mcrocontroller project for under £10 including PCB and case is a win for me.

I don't think they know much about how to do ADCs yet.

Have a look at the performance of the RP2040 ADC - it is awful!

It's tough to put a good 12-bit ADC on a 70 cent dual-core CPU chip. The silicon process, the thermals, the ground loop and noise environment, are all wrong.

The 2040 ADC has chunks of missing codes. It's probably usable as a

We use the ADCs in FPGAs and some other ARM processors, for crude things like checking power supplies. Not for sellable instrumentation.