Raspberry Pi Pico
Well January was busy.
The Raspberry Pi Pico announcement was very interesting, not least for the price of $4. I ordered one the next day, and here is the Pico running a demo on Pimoroni’s cute 1.14" IPS display.
The Pico and display here are both plugged into another Pimoroni product - an expander backplane which really helps with prototyping. Pimoroni have libraries and bootloaders for both MicroPython and C/C++ and setup is a breeze.
The announcement was also interesting for the range of partners that have already picked up the RP2040 microcontroller and are making variants of their own platforms around it. Adafruit is planning a feature-packed Feather board with LiPo charging and USB-C. Pimoroni and SparkFun both have products available already or planned. This looks like the start of an active ecosystem for embedded products, based around the Raspberry Pi platform which many people are already familiar with.