To answer some questions I looked it up... This is an STM32 microcontroller. The firmware makes it enumerate to a PC/Mac/Linux machine as a USB storage device. You program this this be drag-and-drop the binary file to the storage. (or do a "cp" from the command line)
What software environment? You seem to have a wide choice. The Arduino IDE could work or you could use Gcc from the command line or STM' "STM Cube" but my favorite is Mbed from ARM. Some of the RTOS' would work too, like FreeRTOS. Supported input power 1.8–5.5V DC. Most pins are "5 volt tolerant" some are 3.3 volt only. This is basically a replacement fro the $3 "Blue pill" but I think this is done better and has MUCH better documentation. Read everything here https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/pico/pico_datasheet.pdf What to do with these? I'm thinking they will have much more use on robot projects then on machine tool projects. But in the machine tool world they could be sued are a kind of "standard" that performs the same functions we see done by Mesa cards today but at a much lower cost. At $4 we can afford to place one on each axis. My experience with the M0 is that it is powerful enough to run PID controllers for two motors with the encoders are running at about 10,000 less per second and the motors are being controlled with PWM. You can to up to ~10 Mhz pule rates if you use the built-in hardware quadrature decoders. These do the encoder reading in hardware and a re much faster than software interrupts. But I think the M0 has only one channel of this. The main advantage of these vs. others is (1) good documentation, (2) trusted source, (3) low cost. About the cost. $4 is low but look also at the Raspberry Pi Zero. It costs only $5 and runs Linux. It is dramatically more powerful then this "pico" but Linux is just poor at "real-time" and the Pico is outstandingly good at "real-time". So they are complementary. It would be fun to build a $9 robot controller using both. I think I will. On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 8:04 AM Matthew Herd <herd.m...@gmail.com> wrote: > Agreed. It looks promising, but no more so than a "Blue Pill" or similar > boards. Also, what voltages does it operate on? I wasn’t able to find > that in the literature but I didn’t dig into their documentation that > deeply. Nonetheless, it seems like info that should be part of the specs. > > > On Jan 21, 2021, at 10:41 AM, Jon Elson <el...@pico-systems.com> wrote: > > > > On 01/21/2021 02:43 AM, Sven Wesley wrote: > >> For you people out there who use an Arduino or RPi to communicate with > >> parts of the machine (tool changers, doors etc). Here's a cute and > really > >> low priced alternative. > >> https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico/ > >> > >> > > The blurb is pretty sketchy on details. What is the programming > environment like? > > > > Thanks, > > > > Jon > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Emc-users mailing list > > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
