#370 Raspberry Pi Pico vs ESP32 (-S2) and STM32 Blackpill

the raspberry pi foundation spent a lot of money to create a new chip for makers and gives it away for cheap if i believe all the fanboys videos it is the most important invention after sliced bread but how does it compare with the espressif and the stm32 chips let's have a closer look great youtubers here is the guy with the swiss accent with a new episode and fresh ideas around sensors and microcontrollers remember if you subscribe you will always sit in the first row all the past raspberry pi boards were single board computers running linux the smaller microcontroller boards for makers run without an operating system and are dominated by the arduino framework both segments are very different and have their advantages and disadvantages because the new pi pico with an rp2040 chip competes in the arduino segment we will compare the following things ecosystem support how can we program the chip documentation cpu and memory interface possibilities debugging power consumption and we will look at the hyped pio function i will compare it with its main competitors the esp32 the esp32 s2 and the stm32 blackpill let's start with the echo system the raspberry pi foundation is an entirely different company than st microsystems or espressif much more maker focused and according to adafruit much easier to do business with this is excellent news for us and we already see the fruit of that fact micropython and circuit python are already ported to the new chip and arduino announced that it would support it too this is an incredible speed if we compare it with how long it took to support the esp32 or the stm chips the esp32 s2 still is not supported in the official arduino ide package arduino and adafruit already presented their boards using the chip and other manufacturers announced expansion boards also extremely fast so in a short time we will be able to use the new chip in our project incredible what the pi foundation was capable of achieving because of its brand when the pi 4 was launched i ranted about the lack of software support this time it is the contrary i have to congratulate the pie foundation for this lounge i think it was also possible because the chips documentation is excellent as we know it from all the raspberries so the first point definitely goes to the new chip and board it is made for makers and the ecosystem loves it espressif and st microsystems do not have the makers as their primary customers maybe the pi foundation got some help from their british arm colleagues arm currently does not have a prominent position in the maker or stem area and as you will see in my next video a battle started in the chip area with the appearance of risc-v but is the chip useful for us how does it compare with our current darlings here is the comparison table let's start with the course the rp2040 uses the weakest arm core the m0 plus without a floating point unit in my comparison video number 353 the board with the m0 core was by far the slowest but the pi foundation pimped their chip and clocked it with 125 megahertz nearly 4 times the 32 megahertz of my nucleo board so we could assume that it has a maximum of 67 wax mips for integer calculations which could be comparable with a black pill but still way slower than the esp-32 the rp-2040 has two cores like the normal esp32 as with the esp32 we will see where a second core will be useful for sure it needs some skills to program it even if we multiply the floating point number by four it is still way slower than the black pill or the esp32 everybody talks about the pio of the rp2040 what is that it is an extremely simple co-processor that runs at full speed but only understands nine commands the esp32s coprocessors have a different goal they are here to save energy and therefore are slower but they have many more commands the co-processor of the esp32 s2 supports the full risc 5 rv 32imc instruction set both have in common that they have to be programmed in assembler so far i did not see many applications of the esp32 coprocessors and i expect the same with a pio and here is what it can do with a pio blinking neopixels this example uses a short assembler program like this one for the pio the c program calls the assembler program to output fast signals needed for the neopixels not easy to program hopefully we will get libraries which offer us this possibility so the rp2040 cores are nothing special they are on the slower side and we probably will use only one core for most of our projects i would not use it for projects where floating point or speed plays an important role for all other projects it is okay but has no visible advantages the next is flash memory where we store our programs the pico has two megabyte four times more than the black pill but half of the esp32 two megabyte is enough for most of our projects keep in mind that we do not have any wi-fi or bluetooth available for over-the-air updates or hosting websites the sram of 264 kilobyte is big enough for arduino-like c programming where we compile the code if we want to use micropython it is different and the 8 megabyte psram of the esp32 is a massive advantage for larger programs for our first steps or smaller projects with micro or circuit python the ram size is okay storage for the rp2040 is positioned between the black pill and the esp32s the rp2040 offers six pins more than the esp32 and the blackpill this should also result in more usable gpio pins but because the pico and the esp32 chips have an external flash the blackpill has more usable pins for projects but all chips have enough pins for everyday usage its adc should be comparable with the one of the black pill so it should be much better than the ones of the esp32s as we all know this is not very difficult but we have to test it later it supports most of the standard interfaces except for i square s and canvas fortunately these interfaces are not often used and if you need one of those you still can choose a standard esp32 also the number of interfaces is okay maybe on the lower side if compared with the competitors dma seems to be a strong function of arm chips i never used it so i cannot compare it with the esp32s maybe the guys with knowledge can help me out in the comments the rp2040 the blackpill and the esp32 s2 all offer native usb support this is a very cool and useful feature this feature is best shown with micropython if you update raspberry os to the newest version tony the python tool has built-in pi pico support if you connect a picot to a raspberry pi's usb connector and keep the boot button pressed the pco presents itself as an sd card if you start tony and go to tools options interpreter you can select the pi pico as a device and press install or update firmware after few seconds the pico is ready to work with tony this small python program blinks the led and writes hello world if i press run the led starts to blink and the shell shows the output very simple if i change the delay time and press run again the blinking speed immediately changes this is the advantage of an interpreter as shown in video number 240. unfortunately we cannot yet stop the program and debug it as we can if we use python on the big pi let's now continue with the specs all competitors offer an swd interface for debugging with the other boards we use platform io for that unfortunately i do not see any plans to support the pico according to the documentation you can use one core to debug the other one and save a few dollars for a debugging interface looking at the current speed of adoption i do not doubt that we will see the first debugger soon maybe for tony and micropython so far we saw that the features of the rp2040 chip are okay for a typical maker project as long as we do not need wi-fi or ble this is the domain of the esp32s if you want this functionality within rp2040 you have to wait for the next video where i talk about the esp32 c3 and risc-5 power consumption is a deciding factor for battery-operated devices here the m0 cores of the rp2040 can shine they consume only 18 milliampere with a blink sketch the dual core esp32 consumes 53 milliampere with wi-fi switched off the single core esp32 s2 still consumes 30 milliampere and the black pill 26. so far i was not able to do any deep sleep measurements from the data sheet we see that the pico consumes 1.3 to 1.9 milliampere which is 1300 to 1900 micro ampere nothing to write home about they use an rt 6150 buck boost regulator with a quiescent current of 60 micro ampere so there is still hope i like that they selected a buck boost regulator because we can power the 3.3 volt chip from 1.8 to 5.5 volts this means that you can connect a lion or live apo 4 battery directly to the board as well as two or three aa batteries because the pico has no charger you have to change the batteries yourself or add an external charger board none of the cheap competitors offer such a feature only more expensive ttgo boards have lion battery support then with the charger of course lady ada also showed her featherboard with the rp2040 with this feature the price of the board is also everywhere in the news for linux guys a five dollar board is probably cheap but how does it compare with the direct competition the cheaper esp32 boards as well as the black pills are in the same price range i did not include shipping because it would not be fair shipping from china still is cheaper than shipping inside switzerland but getting the board from a swiss supplier is much faster of course i want to thank pie shop switzerland for going out of their way and expediting my order it seems i got the last board laying on the table of their boss thank you very much after all this data we come to my verdict the raspberry pi foundation surprised most of us with this chip and board for me it is not clear why they created their own chip and took a significant financial risk they could have used a standard stm32 or even better an espressif chip with wi-fi maybe there is a larger plan behind it q anon or the man on the moon anyway i do not care for the moment they did a marvelous job in documenting the chips as well as the board as we saw you can start with using the micropython right away adafruit also ported most of circuit python so i hope we also can use lots of sensor libraries if you are a c-plus plus lover you get an sdk and can also start right away if you like most of us use the arduino framework you do not need to hurry i tried to use the c plus plus sdk but after four frustrating hours i understood why we all love arduino for the moment i do not see a project where i need a pipe pico but for sure i will try it instead of an esp32 or a blue pill in one of my next projects maybe the pico will give micro python or circuit python a considerable spin in the right direction we will see as usual we have to see if interesting projects use this chip and here i can imagine that the raspberry foundation will invest some time and money more than expressive or st microsystems i also like that we have an alternative to st or expressive maybe competition helps us to get better stuff in the future i'm curious about the next step of the raspberry pi foundation it will not be easy for them to establish a new chip against an established competition a typical uphill battle i'm also curious about the pricing i still remember when they promoted the pi zero as a five dollar computer i never paid five dollars for such a board i usually paid around fifteen dollars as always you find all the relevant links in the description i hope this video was useful or at least interesting for you if true please consider supporting the channel to secure its future existence thank you bye

Channel: Andreas Spiess

Views: 347,809

Keywords: arduino, arduino project, beginners, diy, do-it-yourself, eevblog, electronics, esp32, esp32 datasheet, esp32 project, esp32 tutorial, esp8266, esp8266 datasheet, esp8266 project, greatscott, guide, hack, hobby, how to, iot, lorawan, nodemcu, project, simple, smart home, ttgo, wemos, wifi, Pi pico, raspberry Pi Pico, comparison, ESP32-S2, RISC-V, Raspberry Pi, wi-fi

Id: cVHCllbN3bQ

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021