Hello Subscriber, welcome to the April 2022 edition.

The Raspberry Pi RP2040 has been growing in leaps and bounds. I like this particular MCU because it costs only about $1 on its own, and is available on the Raspberry Pi Pico as a development board for $4. All this for a dual Cortex-M0+ running at 133MHz with 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of QSPI Flash memory. It also has Direct Memory Access (DMA), 4 State Machines that make Programmable IO (PIO) possible, as well as 2 I2C, 2 SPI, and 2 UART. It also exposes 26 GPIO pins.

The dual processors mean you can run a thread concurrently with your main loop. The state machines let you run certain operations without tying up your main processors.

The RP2040 now has official TinyML support in the form of TensorFlow Lite for RP2040, so you can run some lightweight inference models on it. If you are still new to TensorFlow and can't train and deploy your model from scratch, Edge Impulse has announced official support for the RP2040.

Learning Content

• HackSpace Magazine Issue 39 introduces the Raspberry Pi Pico and provides a lot of information. (Free PDF Download)
• Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico will provide a gentle introduction for anyone who is new to embedded systems programming. (Free PDF Download)

Recent Events

• I spent an hour speaking to members of the TensorFlow User Group (TFUG) Azerbaijan about Machine Learning on Edge Devices. My slides are available here.
• Edge Impulse organized an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) to mark the release of the TinyML Cookbook.

What's New in Embedded Development

• New updates have been announced for Arm Virtual Hardware.
• The Raspberry Pi 4 is difficult to get a hold of. However, you can still test out your solutions virtually on AWS with Virtual Raspberry Pi 4 running on AWS Graviton Processors.
• Perpetual motion machines are still a long way off, but energy harvesting appears to be knocking on the door. This article covers two companies making progress building sensors that can generate energy from the environment (heat or vibration, for example).
• I wrote a MicroPython example that shows you how to read temperature and humidity using the Raspberry Pi Pico and how to display those values on an LCD.

I would like to invite you to join the IoT and Embedded Development Meetup group so you can get notifications of any upcoming webinars or physical event.

Thanks for reading and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. Until next time.