News from the Raspberry Pi Front

@August 19, 2024

Years ago the Raspberry Pi has been one of those disruptive developments on the embedded front beautifully bridging the gap between Arduinos and low-cost computers. It’s great for prototyping while powerful enough for not having to worry about prematurely optimizing code. Today, it’s still a major contender in the same field and keeps delivering better efficiency and features.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2

The Pico 2 comes as a $5 micro-controller board and is a worthy upgrade to the Pico. You can also get just a single QFN80 chip for ~$1.30+tax that even includes 2Mb of QSPI flash.

Eben Upton Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our new $5 microcontroller board, on sale now - Raspberry Pi

Be sure to check out the many partner boards on the bottom of the page for ready-to-use solutions. And although they’re not shipping a RISC-V just yet, it looks like at least options are somewhere in the pipeline. This time it’s exciting to see the endorsed preview - read more on the linked blog post.

…The Pico 2 already found a particularly cool application of the new processing power in de-noising live audio: Ashley Whittaker Real-time ML audio noise suppression on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 - Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 5

Although the Pi 5 was already announced last fall, the Raspberry Pi 5 is now selling a 2Gb ram model at $50 with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz. ($65 With the fan and case.)

Although we do not recommend the 2Gb variant for developing use cases or anything that’s display-driven, it’s a great budget saver if you have a developed application that you know will not consume more.

If you’re looking to upgrade an existing Pi 4 you’ll be content with the new more efficient chip but be careful to reconsider an existing 15W/3A power supply if you’re upgrading an existing use case that draws power off USB. Since the board needs more reserves to accommodate power spikes, they’re taking USB down to 600mA. No worries there if you get a 27W power supply ($12.)

Eben Upton 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $50 - Raspberry Pi

Also a great option that makes the RPi long-term write-heavy applications is the $12 M.2+ hat so you can start using more reliable M.2 SSDs instead of the typical SD cards.

Our primary wish at this point would be to have a fan-less encased option since the Pi 4 and 5 will quickly exhaust their thermal reserves and will downclock accordingly. The passive Pi 5 can also not be used in the OEM casing.