DESK OF LADYADA - It's an RP2040 & Pico Party!

[Music] [Applause] [Music] and welcome desolate data hey everybody wow it has been an exciting week can you believe all the stuff that's happened i barely can um no okay no it feels now i do not want to believe what's happening okay i know but we are still stuck with it we are in this reality uh sadly um but okay let's let's top it off okay in addition to um having uh our government change over we had a in america we had inauguration uh there was also the release of a new chip the raspberry pi pico based on the rp2040 a new microcontroller has entered the arena very exciting because uh you know microcontrollers have really been dominated by um you know big players like nxp and st and atmel slash microchip and then you know people sometimes use uh nuvoton or renaissas but for the most part there's like kind of basically five or six big ones espresso came in a couple years ago with the esp series and now there is the rp 2040. so we did a big live stream on wednesday night very early um and uh you can go check that out it's on youtube where we talked for about 30 minutes about the chip but uh now it's been out for a couple days so people are maybe more used to it so if you have questions about the chip i only had it for like two weeks or three weeks more than most people like it wasn't i didn't know about this month and months ago this is fairly new still to me um but we did get to put together a couple of boards so i can show those off on the overhead if people want to see yeah some of these designs let's uh start off with that okay so we have um this is the pico pico and then we have a couple boards and we have more boards in the works yeah okay so this is the first board i designed not surprisingly it's a feather so it's um you know almost about the same size as the pico it's like a little bit shorter it looks like and it's a little bit wider so it's not like pin compatible um and like i'll just compare them side by side for ease of comparison uh so the pico has a micro usb port and our feather has a usb type c because folks seem to like that um we have a lipo charger on the feather because people like the lipo charger and a linear regulator whereas um this chip is a buck boost which means which covered buck boosts a couple weeks ago you can use i think like two to five volts anywhere in between so it's a very forgiving power supply the pico does not have a reset button it only has a boot loader button but we have a reset button here and the boot loader button down there i really like reset buttons uh they're quite handy we have a debug swd port so this chip is a cortex m0 so it uses swd um and so we have like the standard 2x5 uh header connector here whereas on the pico it's you saw the wires on the end we have the same chip it's got the cute raspberry pi logo on it uh we have an soic flash chip um this one is a uson flash i think up here you know pretty much the same idea though it's like you've got a flash chip and uh we're not exactly sure which size we're going to ship on the feather i think four megabytes because this is shared with circuit python or micropython as well as the internal memory because this has no internal flash uh and then this is that bootloader button uh there's a crystal here crystal here and this is a stem iqt connector people love those for plug and play um all sorts of sensors we also have a itsy bitsy um just making it really small you can see we kind of took the design and squished it quite a bit um so it's got pins all the way around uh so lots of gpio like 23 gpio a reset button a bootloader button flash memory here again probably four megabytes neopixel all the uh power supply stuff needed and the pico chip over here and this one i have to add silk screen and stuff the feather is getting close to release and you know we also have circuit python released for it that was another thing that happened this week we have been working on circuit python mostly scott and like i you know did a couple small board definitions and and bug reports over the last couple weeks um and it works really well and if you really like the circuit python experience of plugging in it you know plugging it into your computer search it for the disk drive you can edit files we have a lot of the peripherals working like we have i squared c and spi and display i o um you know json regular expressions um you know file system stuff we're still working on uart and audio so that isn't supported quite yet those are usually the last things that we get added into a new build um definition but uh we do have some pio supports we actually have an assembler that scott wrote so when you write your pio code it's actually in like the c format it's basically to kind of copy and paste it in and then we actually parse and assemble the instructions on the fly and push them into the pio peripheral you have questions is there a specific usbc that you usually use uh darren's designing a board was planning to use the usb micro but now debating switching usb-c i like these usb-c so first off they're glossy and they kind of look like a little candy um we stock actually these in the shop um we also did i think a great search on usbc yeah but i like these simplified ones um because usbc there can be one there are connectors that have like the thunderbolt connectors and like all of the different pins um but this is a simplified usb 2.0 only only it only brings out the pins that you really need they're not too expensive they're like 25 50 cents a piece um so very comparable with the micro usb and not much bigger um i think they probably picked a micro usb though because this can also be a usb host and um the micro b is a usb host friendly connector because you can have it be by you know it can be one direction or the other direction whereas usb-c is really peripheral only what's the cpu speed of the pico the chip um has a crystal of 12 megahertz and it phase lock loops that up it sounds like for most c and micro python and circuit python i think we're running it around 125 megahertz you can run it at 133 comfortably that's the specification but a lot of the really funky crazy demos of like it's running a monitor or two or it's like an emulator those are running it i think at 200 megahertz so you can overclock it um apparently and um you know when you overclock it you know you're breaking the warranty in technicality but it seems to work all right i'll answer this one uh anyone else impressed on how under the radar that rp2040 and pico came those were in the know but the indiana embargo was so really respected there was not a peep until it was announced yeah so um we were invited i think maybe about a month before it released to repo because we do technical work and i'll say this i was going to write a note to evan about it but um just ran out of time during the week i think this is a really good example of what everyone says is possible but they never go for it so sparkfun was there arduino was there pymeroni was there and somehow someway all of us without lawyers and tons of middlemen there wasn't like nda signing for everybody i mean it was like so it was a secret thing we all agreed just to like not share anything and uh somehow we did it and you know working with other companies um you know there's big chip companies that wanted to talk to us or work with makers and it's like you just can't they they sign a five-year nda and like crazy not only that they want to have five or six zoom phone calls because they have 14 000 people in their organization and they don't have enough stuff to do yeah so everyone's like well we should meet constantly always forever and before um kovid they're like no we absolutely have to come out and spend a week in adafruit no you have to come out to texas or whatever you absolutely have to yeah and so i think this was everyone's um desire to get beyond that because um it doesn't make sense it never made sense and now finally i think we can prove and this is you know again if there's time i would write an entire thing just on this because we saved so much time and money not having to deal with like todd and marketing that's like bothering us on zoom calls for hours and days at a time yeah it was mostly just evidence there's no todds evan just emailed and said hey here's a chip do you want to like hang out make hardware and i said yeah sure spec's so good and he's like okay you're invited to the github repo yeah that was it so like everyone was like hey this is great let's not mess this up because like we just we're just tortured by like these terrible giant chip companies or they're the worst anyways uh okay any other questions people have or no people agree okay cool uh i'm glad they agreed so it's like it's okay um okay let's see if there's anything else here um keep going okay well i thought let's let's so let's jump you know that we've seen that the rp2040 uh you know if you get a pico um you know put it together and check out circuit python we have a build release for it it's in the downloads page it's all merged in it's wonderful uses team usb and uf2 um and um one thing that um as our segway um we we're doing a couple tick tocks and we've been posting them and that was exciting we did that this week as well and we got a question on um our tick tock let's pull up the question well we're going to do the great search now right well yeah all right so let's kick up the great search and then do the question okay let's go [Music] all right the great search brought to you by different digikey this is a question from our tick tock and this is what's going to be this week's great search what type of brands otter do you use for projects i've done my last spool from radio shack that's right crying tears emoji okay robbie uh a great question um because uh yeah solder is not as easy as it used to be and yeah a lot of people really liked uh solder that they could get from the local electronics shop and uh i thought i would show that you can buy soda from digikey which is doesn't like it's kind of obvious of course they would sell solder but a lot of people like don't think about that they end up buying it from like elsewhere because they don't like you know your hardware store or whatever when in fact you can buy like pretty much any kind of solder you like from digikey um so let's uh let's go check out what's available on the digikey site for solder um okay so let's open up digikey and um so one thing i wanted to show is the person asked how do i get um you know i got my my radio shack solder so what a lot of people when they say that what they mean is i don't know moves over here they mean the silver bearing sorry they mean the silver bearing solder this is kind of like a famous not inexpensive um but really popular solder that was available for many many years um at your at your local shop and uh one cool thing about solder is you can you know solder a solder like pretty much as long as you get the same metal uh uh contributions correct like all the different metals that are inside of the solder you're gonna have the same experience which is really good so if you want to like get a pound of this instead of you know 1.5 ounces it's possible but here's something to watch for uh so i went to digikey and i just typed in you know this says silver bearing solder and i was like okay i'll search for like silver solder and what came up was actually uh you know there's a couple categories but if you go to solder um you'll notice that they do have solder but the only ones that come up under this search are these lead-free solders that are and then you have to look at the composition um 96 percent tin and uh four four percent silver so let me show it will still only be in stock which is not what you want right this composition is not the composition you see in this photo which is 62 36 2 and it says here 10 62 lead 36 silver two and if you're wondering like well how do you know what all these are you look it up in your periodic table of the elements that's how um these are labels they don't literally say lead well they still something say lead free but they won't say like ten eight percent or whatever you have to look up the symbol on your periodic table so having done that um we'll and you know if you look at this then you're probably thinking well they don't they don't stock the kind of solder but it's not true they do you just have to know how to search for it so instead what you want to search for is wire solder and solder comes in like bars and paste and stuff but we're looking for the wire solder style and then click on solder i'm sure like the british people are like it's solder sorry i'm american it's solder here um okay and then let's go to active just so we we only get stuff we can get and again we want wire solder so let's select that and there's all these different brands but here you can see the compositions and again it's in you know chemical percentage style so you'll have to like read carefully because there's like a lot of letters and numbers and they're not sorted because they're it's not a number so going back this is um 10 62 lead 36 so let's even get close so this is lead 60 uh 1040 that's not what we want we want like okay this looks pretty close there's there's 1062 lead 36 at silver two okay so this is what we want uh and then let's just make sure there's nothing else there's a couple other silver ones with this ag symbol but they have like more tin we want the tin lead now say this is obviously it has lead in it it is not lead free solder so if you are running a rojas shop or you're trying to be a lead free operation you wouldn't use this in production however i do use a lot of solder when i'm putting together prototypes why it's just like a it is a lot easier to use um and it's a lot easier to rework and if i'm doing prototypes i may not have all the tools that we have in production where we do you know stenciling and we have optical inspection so i might use let it solder at home because i'm in america and it's illegal to use blooded solder this is the land of the free and the leaded okay so apply to only see those all right so now we have a lot of options but let's let's look at only the ones in stock because i want to order this today um so first thing you note is there's a couple different uh packages and a couple different um widths of solder so the diameter of the solder is also something you want to pay attention to so you can see here there's half a millimeter and point eight millimeters or you know .02 inch or .03 inch which do you want well if you're doing you know fine pitch soldering usually you probably want to go with with 0.02 or even 0.15 a 0.015 if you're doing a lot of thick through-hole like chunky stuff um 0.031 i happen to like 0.02 even for the thick stuff but like it's you know you can also try a little bit of each but basically for smt .02 through-hole i like .03 if you look at this this is uh kind of right in the middle there it's 0.022 but let's just say 0.2 0.02 you know what i mean all right so now we only have nine options um so now the options are there's a couple different suppliers there's chip quick and there's kester and there's different packages so you can get these little spools now personally i can't stand these i always feel like there's just way too little solder but if you're only doing a couple repairs once in a while goes in your toolbox you know what these aren't too bad and they're inexpensive this is six bucks which is pretty cheap for silver solder um that said you could also if you're just going like whole hog you can get um you know from kester a one pound um uh spool or from chick chip quick they also have a one pound spool and um so this is a one pound spool you know this lasts like a really long time like you know even i using solder all the time this will last me more than a year so a pound is quite a bit that said you know if you really like this solder you know you pick up a pound of it for 50 bucks and like you never have to think about it again but you know let's say we're not like that we want um like this one is uh one and a half ounces 42 grams i personally think that you should probably get about 50 grams plus a solder anything less and i think you're just going to be frustrated because you're running out unexpectedly so let's look at the two and four ounce maybe also the eight ounce and let's ignore the one ounce spool way too small and the less than one ounce tubes also ridiculous uh another thing just to watch for is um there's a couple different fluxes available there's no clean no clean water soluble and wasn't activated now technically i believe that the um this silver bearing solder even though it's not mentioned here i believe it is rosin activated which is a solder that's technically you need to clean off and i personally prefer no clean and luckily when you're looking for these sizes it's only available no clean you know if you really want to research whether you want activated it activates going to be a little bit easier to solder and we work with but it it is active like you should clean it off after you're done whereas no clean you don't have to clean okay so uh given that these are all no clean here's your option so you can get two four and eight ounce for about 12 20 and 25 the more you get uh the cheaper it's gonna be that's just how it goes um it's kind of like some incentive to get a little bit more but you know this this two ounce is still a pretty good amount this will last you uh you know a month or two at least even if you're doing a lot of soldering so i would pick this up this one is my my recommended so smd 3sw from chip quick letted solder um if you are in i just want to go back even that's my pick um going back to wire wire solder if you're in a uh you know your your rojas you are lead free um click the rojas compliant check box and then when you search um you're not gonna get the leaded solder over here you're gonna get only the tin and silver and for that you know the one i tend to use when i have to go lead free is this one which let me see if i can read off what it says this one is uh 96.5 10 and uh 3 silver and a little bit of copper so it's like one of these but you know you can also look online there's people who definitely have i mean like there's gonna be a lot more lead-free solder options because people are so picky and it's so difficult to work with these solders um another thing of course you can do is just look at you know what's the most popular by searching for stock and then reverse searching by a mountain stock so yeah these kesters and multi-cores these this one is pretty popular this lead free so that might tell you like you know what you might want to pick up because it's like everyone else seems to like it you might like it too but um definitely you know if you're looking for lead free you're not going to be able to get that nice silver bearing solder you're going to have silver in your soldering wire but it's not going to be the same size you think you remember from when you were a kid putting together together uh through whole kits from radio shack all right and that's a great church thank you where in the world is that part i need a great [Music] all right so here are some questions okay okay we'll start with a soldering one since i came in any thoughts on soldering spire uh thought the resin would sublimate or something no solder paste has shelf life issues i'm sorry they said for solder paste for solder expiring uh wire solder doesn't really expire um keep it not wet yeah i mean like it doesn't really go bad i've never even heard of that i mean definitely paste does uh you have to keep it cold there's an expiration date on it but that's because it it starts to separate a little bit too much and i definitely i had to toss out uh some a little bit of solder paste left over um a like a week ago because it was a year after expiration and it finally you can tell when it goes bad you're like this is really squishy and mushy all right well uh folks are answering this in the chat but uh what's the uh benefits of lead solder let solder is easy to work with uh requires a lower temperature um it's shinier it it doesn't mat as much as it doesn't bunch together as much um but it has lead in it and in some countries it's it's not used anymore it's not available for purchase and if you're selling stuff you can't use it and call your product real house compliant okay uh next up i have four picos on the way i'm hoping to use them as usb midi devices hopefully written entirely in python can this be done absolutely uh very easy just check out any of our usb midi project uh examples um it just works in circuit python perfectly i actually tested it myself as one of the tests that i did when i first got the picot okay how does the 2040 compare with the tnt m4 feathers i was wondering if any specific project scenarios might be suited for pico um pico is just it's just pretty fast uh and it's it's low cost so you're gonna get like teen c3 type speeds from it um even though this is a cortex m0 um you know it has some for stuff that's not pure floating point calculations you're going to get pretty good performances because it's running at 120 megahertz or 125. so i found it to be a really good experience for circuit python also there's a lot of ram so there are a lot of situations where having like 256k of ram lets you um uh calculate and manipulate your data um a lot faster than if you have to like save it to disk and read it back like with 256k you can keep a large data set in memory to manually uh to to work on okay and then someone know um i'll just paraphrase uh how do they get access to the chips the rp 2040 um smaller maker companies like electronic cats the chips will be about look i only got like 10 chips like i have two left which is always stressful for me the way that i think that they did this so if you're an authorized reseller which anyone can apply be an authorized reseller you have to sell stuff they went through those channels first because they're authorized resellers and those are the folks who knew the boards were coming yeah um you know within like 30 days or so maybe it was a little bit longer than that and then uh we got the heads up and got a small number of chips like 10 um about a month or so ago and i'm sure digikey is going to have it yeah because they're an authorized reseller and as soon as they are we'll do a great service yeah we've only heard that this is gonna you know their goal is to get these out on everything yes they're absolutely gonna sell them in the reels i don't i can't see what the pricing is because it's none of my business um but it's gonna be very competitive and i'm sure you'll be able to buy them digikey um we'll probably stock you know one officer just want a couple we'll we'll have them but uh you there they will be generally available this is not how it is with the broadcom chips used on the raspberry pi you cannot purchase those broadcom chips unlike the pi zero they're not available to you um because like broadcom is is very protective of who they sell chips to whereas with the pico the pie foundation has you know from what i've heard they are completely interested in having everybody get access to these uh chips so you'll you'll be able to get them does lamar use low temp rework solder um i use uh this leaded solder for what i'm doing rework but uh my paste is lead-free okay uh do you have to worry about lead fumes lead doesn't fume okay like if you think about it like there's no metal doesn't create a fume what you're thinking about is the the flux and you just have a fan okay uh will the increased memory contain more circuit python libraries and the m0 feathers oh tons more yeah i mean like you can you can just go to town um you can import pretty much every library almost um it's just massive 264k is a lot i mean you don't get me wrong you can exhaust it but it's not easy all right and uh yeah shout out to electronic cats okay now well they're uh pretty much my favorite uh maker open source hardware companies yeah they're my favorite feline based neighbor company yeah i don't know it's good stuff but yeah you'll be able to get these chips will will i get them maybe a little bit before you yeah probably because i've already been able to put an order but you'll get them like a week or two later yeah there's no i didn't there's no secret agreement where only i get them it's not that's not how it is at all i just got 10 samples yeah usually we're excluded from stuff so yeah that's how it goes okay cool that's that's my show that's it for this week we'll see everybody during the week we have our shows on tuesday wednesday and thursday and friday stay tuned for all that stuff more surprises and new hardware coming out more okay cheers everybody have a great next week that was disabled [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Adafruit Industries

Views: 9,213

Keywords: adafruit, electronics, diy, arduino, hardware, opensource, projects, raspberry, pi, computer, raspberrypi, microcontrollers, limor, limorfried, ladyada, STEAM, STEM, python, microbit, circuitpython, neopixel, neopixels, raspberry pi, circuitplaygound, nyc, make, makers, micro:bit, adafrit, adafruit promo code, ada fruit, adafruit coupons, raspberry pi zero, micropython, machine learning, ai, tensorflow

Id: jIUV9gYLYpk

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fubarx]

So far only Arduino has announced a board with wireless networking. Will be waiting to see if/when more of these types roll out. Be good for ESP-32 to get some competition.