Linux4Us

The Raspberry Pi Pico is the first microcontroller from the Pi foundation and can be programmed in C or MicroPython

As many already forecasted, it's finally official. The Raspberry Pi foundation enters the microcontrollers segment with its new Raspberry Pi Pico offered on a very-affordable U$4.00.

About Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico is designed as a low-cost breakout board for RP2040. It pairs RP2040 with 2MB of Flash memory, and a power supply chip supporting input voltages from 1.8-5.5V allowing it to be powered from a variety of sources, including two or three AA cells in series, or a single lithium-ion cell.

Source: Raspberry Pi

What it includes

Other details of the Raspberry Pi Pico include:

a Dual-core Cortex-M0+ processor
2MB Flash
264K SRAM
USB 1.1 with device and host support
programmable I/O
26 multifunction GPIO pins
3 analogue inputs
temperature sensor
Operating temperature varying between -20°C to +85°C
a single push button, which can be used to enter USB mass-storage mode at boot time
a general input, and a single LED exposing 26 of the 30 GPIO pins on RP2040, including three of the four analogue inputs, to 0.1”-pitch pads;
solder headers allowing to solder Pico directly to a carrier board

Were to buy

The Pico is available now on the Raspberry Pi Store today online or via the trusted reseller network. But, you can also get a Pico with the purchase of a HackSpace magazine comes with a free Pico, as well as plenty of guides and tutorials to help you get started with it.

Source: Raspberry Pi

Documentation

The organization is also releasing an official guide. You can find complete documentation for Raspberry Pi Pico, and for RP2040, its SDK and toolchain, here. The book is ideal for beginners who are starting with microcontrollers.

The book is also available for free on this link and on it, you will learn how to:

Set up your Raspberry Pi Pico and start using it
Start writing programs using MicroPython
Control and sense electronic components
Discover how to use Pico’s unique Programmable IO
Make a reaction game, burglar alarm, temperature gauge, and many more

MicroPython

Differently from Arduino, the Raspberry Pi Pico can be programmed with C or MicroPython, a lightweight implementation of a programming language largely compatible with Python 3, written in C, that is optimized to run on a microcontroller. MicroPython is a full Python compiler and runtime that runs on the microcontroller's hardware.

Source

Raspberry Pi Blog

What changed

To understand why this is important, it's important some context. This is how RHEL and CentOS used to be built:

Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL -> CentOS

Since the communicating the end of CentOS, this is the new workflow:

Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL

Two new the new programs added to RHEL

To cover that gap, two new programs were announced: no-cost RHEL for small production workloads and no-cost RHEL for customer development teams.

No-cost RHEL for small production workloads

With the updated program Red Hat now allows the Individual Developer subscription for RHEL to be used in production for up to 16 systems. For comparison, before the program limited its use to single-machine developers and no production availability. That's a big gain for developers and small organizations who now will use RHEL more comfortably as a development platform and potently deploy them to production (no support included) for up to 16 systems.

The program was also expanded so you can You can also use the expanded Red Hat Developer program to run RHEL on major public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. You have to pay only the usual hosting fees charged by your provider of choice; the operating system is free for both development and small production workloads.

For more information about the program, check this page.

No-cost RHEL for customer development teams

In addition to the updates mentioned above, a new program called no-cost RHEL for customer development teams was created. Via this program, it will now be easier for customer development teams to join the Red Hat Developer program and take advantage of its benefits. Development teams can now be added to this program at no additional cost via the customer’s existing subscription, helping to make RHEL more accessible as a development platform for the entire organization.

For more information about the program, check this page.

Availability

This updated Individual Developer subscription for RHEL will be available by February 1st, 2021.

Other programs coming

The announcement however still mentions the company is working on a variety of additional programs for other use cases, which should be communicated by mid-February. It's expected that it should cover large CentOS shops deploying more than 16 production servers.

Commitment to CentOS Stream

To finish, Red Hat re-stated their commitment on Fedora and CentOS Stream as innovation and stability pillars for upcoming RHEL releases. They say:

We’re making CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this:

Fedora Linux is the place for major new operating system innovations, thoughts, and ideas - essentially, this is where the next major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is born.

CentOS Stream is the continuously delivered platform that becomes the next minor version of RHEL.

RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in nearly every industry in the world, from cloud-scale deployments in mission-critical data centers and localized server rooms to public clouds and out to far-flung edges of enterprise networks.

Final Thoughts

This is definitely good news for orphaned CentOS Linux sysadmins. However, most of us wonder why didn't they announce this at the same time they communicated the deprecation of CentOS. Anyhow, developers and smaller companies could definitely benefit from this updated model and migrate their workloads directly to RHEL instead of using alternative CentOS clones such as Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Assuming they still trust Red Hat.

Thursday, January 21, 2021

The Raspberry Pi Pico is officially released