When the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the RP2040 microcontroller earlier this year, the cheapest way to get your hands on one was to buy a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico board or a similar module powered by the MCU.

Now you can buy the microcontroller itself as a standalone product for just $1. You can find a list of places to buy one (or a bunch) at Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 website.

The microcontroller is a 40nm chip that features two 133 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ CPU cores, 264KB of RAM, and hardware support for USB 1.1, UART, SPI, and I2C as well as a programmable input/output system that enables software support for things like SD cards and video output.

Of course, the chip on its own isn’t very useful unless it’s combined with some sort of printed circuit board so that you can supply power and connect hardware to the chip. But by selling the microcontroller as a standalone product, Raspberry Pi is making it easier for developers, hobbyists, and other advanced users to design their own hardware around the chip.

You can find software libraries (MicroPython, C, and C++), data sheets, and other documentation for the RP2040 at the Raspberry Pi website.

via Raspberry Pi Blog

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,545 other subscribers

2 replies on “Now you can buy a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller for $1”

  2. This MCU can boot without an external flash memory, and have the uf2 app loaded into ram memory. If a USB cable is always connected, this can be a very inexpensive device. I would like to see one that acts as an i2c/spi/uart/gpio master when connected to a PC… and in a much smaller form factor to the Pico board.

Comments are closed.