The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny $4 microcontroller running off the company’s very own chip

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s microcomputer can be used for anything from homemade cameras to

cucumber sorters, and now the organization is expanding to include microcontrollers and custom silicon chips.

Raspberry Pi Pico is the first step.This is a new microcontroller that costs $4 less than a regular Pi and has a

customized chip that is powerful enough to be used in machine learning projects

(according to The Raspberry Pi Foundation)

and is now on sale.

In its introductory blog post, the company explains that today’s Raspberry Pis are already often used alongside a smaller microcontroller:

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.

Now, the company has one of its own.

In a first for the microcomputer maker, the Pico is powered by a custom chip designed in house called the RP2040. The Pico board features the new chip, 2MB of flash memory, a clickable button, and a Micro USB Type B port. Here are the RP2040’s full specs:

Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ @ 133MHz

264KB (remember kilobytes?) of on-chip RAM

Support for up to 16MB of off-chip Flash memory via dedicated QSPI bus

DMA controller

Interpolator and integer divider peripherals

30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs

2 × UARTs, 2 × SPI controllers, and 2 × I2C controllers

16 × PWM channels

1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support

8 × Raspberry Pi Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines

USB mass-storage boot mode with UF2 support, for drag-and-drop programming

These specifications may affect each other, but the best way to illustrate the potential of the new Raspberry Pi product is to see it used in cool places. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has collaborated with companies such as Arduino, Adafruit and Pimoroni to integrate the new RP2040 chip into other boards and gadgets. The blog post announcing Pico has a complete list, but it is worth noting that Pimoroni's PicoSystem game console, Adafruit's Feather RP 2040 development board and Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. Raspberry Pi Pico is now sold through approved dealers for $4. The microcontroller will also be given away for free in the February issue of HackSpace magazine.