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“We risk-bought quite a lot of wafers, and could sell one to two million per month, up to the maximum of our test capacity,” Raspberry Pi Trading’s applications director Roger Thornton told Electronics Weekly in Nuremberg. “You can buy a reel today, and you will have it in three to four weeks.”
The company is hoping to turn the heads of designers struggling to get hold of their favoured microcontrollers due to the chip shortage, offering the 7 x 7mm QFN-56 RP2040, which has two 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores and 264kbyte of ram, but no flash – instead it supports up to 16Mbyte of external flash over a QSPI bus. Production is guaranteed until at least January 2030.
Appropriate software development tools are freely available.
For those tempted, the 7inch (500 pieces) reel price is $400, and the 3,400 piece 13inch reel is $2,380.
If you are at Embedded World and only want one, and don’t mind it being soldered to a Raspberry Pi Pico development board, head over to the Raspberry Pi stand in the corner of Hall 4A (4A-101). (Wednesday 22jun update: Raspberry Pi was still handing out Pico boards like sweets.)
What about the shortage of Raspberry Pi educational computers?
Supplies are still limited, confirmed Thornton. “When it is not one part, it’s another,” he said. “We are spending a huge amount of time sourcing parts.”
The various Pis are all still being made as part supplies allow, he said, with delivery focussed on businesses that depend on Raspberry Pi boards arriving to survive – “The tricky decision is that we had to prioritise industrial customers,” he said.
It’s a reasonable processor if you can do without on-board flash. We used it to replace some ST parts that are unobtainium at the moment. But beware that the software support is prehistoric at best, and virtually unusable on a PC. RPL just don’t/won’t understand that embedded software design is just one small part of a long chain of tools needed to produce a complete product and those tools need integrating together on a single platform, which is usually Windows at most companies. We then tried to use it (well 26 of it to be precise) on another more complex product but had to give up after a brief email exchange with their CEO and have the project on hold waiting for the ST parts to become available again.