Pico is designed to be high-performance, low-cost, and provide a flexible way of interacting with other hardware. With two ARM Cortex M0+ cores running at up to 133MHz and 264kB of RAM there’s plenty of processing power for most tasks. The 26 GPIO pins include two I2C, two SPI, two UART, three analogue inputs, and a new feature called Programmable I/O (PIO). There’s also 2Mb of flash for your programs and data.
$4 is pretty good.
They’ve also had it open for their contributors to create their own boards around the RP2040. Sparkfun already announced some boards that have some add-ons and work with other things in their ecosystem: Hello Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040! - News - SparkFun Electronics
Perhaps the most interesting (to me) part of this thing. It has 2x PIO peripherals, each with 4 state machines, and a mux to allow each state machine to access any (or all) of the GPIO. It’s sort of like some programmable DMA peripherals I’ve used but the language seems more thought out for the task and there is a lot more hardware support (FIFOs with DMA read/write, shift registers, interrupts).
I expect that it will get some use like the PRU on the BeagleBone Black. Would be interesting for motion control. I just wish it had an ethernet PHY or some wifi.
Just picked up five of these at MicroCenter. $2 each up to five. Beyond that the price jumps to $4. They literally just got them. They had to go to the back and open the box.