The Raspberry Pi Foundation today detailed an internally developed microcontroller chip for “internet of things” projects that will become available to customers starting at a mere $4.

Dubbed Pico, the chip will also ship as part of partner-made circuit boards that will add on extra components such as flash storage and sensors.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a U.K.-based nonprofit launched in 2009 to promote computer science education. It’s the creator of the Raspberry Pi, a miniature computer packaged into a single circuit board that has sold millions of units worldwide. The organization also develops other compute modules that are used in projects ranging from homemade VMware servers and other hobbyist-built gadgets to industrial automation initiatives, as well as the occasional art experiment aboard the International Space Station.  

The Pico (pictured) is the first microcontroller developed internally by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. A microcontroller is a type of low-powered chip designed to perform a narrower set of tasks than a central processing unit or the original Raspberry Pi, which includes multiple computing modules. Such chips are often used to power devices that form parts of a larger machine, like the subsystems of a robotic arm.

According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Pico is powered by two CPU cores based on Arm Ltd.’s Cortex-M0+ architecture, the chip design firm’s most power-efficient processor blueprint. The cores operate at a frequency of up to 133 megahertz and have a quarter of a megabyte of onboard memory at their disposal for storing data. Also included is a set of eight so-called programmable I/O state machines, which are circuits that help shuffle information in and out of the Pico for processing.

Data is transmitted via several dozen input and output pins along the sides of the chip that allow it to connect to other electronics. The pins can be used to attach up to 16 megabytes of flash storage to the Pico, as well as other components such as sensors.

“Many hobbyist and industrial applications pair a Raspberry Pi with a microcontroller,” Raspberry Pi Chief Operating Officer James Adams wrote in a blog post today. “The Raspberry Pi takes care of heavyweight computation, network access, and storage, while the microcontroller handles analogue input and low-latency I/O and, sometimes, provides a very low-power standby mode.”

The Pico even lends itself to certain artificial intelligence projects. “With two fast cores and a large amount of on-chip RAM, RP2040 [the two-core Arm-based CPU at the heart of the chip] is a great platform for machine learning applications,” Adams added.

Photo: Raspberry Pi Foundation