The Raspberry Pi Foundation always knows how to please or surprise us and push other manufacturers to make interesting steps and solutions for good competition.On Thursday (fish day, by the way), January 21, 2021, a new microcontroller RP2040 and a small board using it, called Raspberry Pi Pico, were announced.To be honest, I read this news and didn't plan to do anything about it.

But then I accidentally noticed a few features of this microcontroller, which piqued my curiosity and prompted me to buy a couple of boards for further experiments.

It was the PIO blocks and lots of PWM.

In all fairness, PWM can be solved somehow, but PIO is worth playing around with.Unfortunately, I have not mastered PIO well enough, so PIO features are beyond the scope of this article.

But if it will be very interesting for the community, I may continue it after sharing something.The Raspberry Pi Pico is a board with an RP2040 microcontroller.Bear in mind it's not a PC running a grown-up OS like Linux.

It's a microcontroller, and as such, the Pico has different uses than the Raspberry Pi Zero and other older Raspberry Pi family products.Here are some of the specifications:Two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores @ 133MHz264 KB memory (284 KB if you disable XIP caching and use USB memory)2MB flash memory with XIP caching.