Brilliant little devices.
Have one doing lighting systems...
If you only need the smallest of Raspberry Pi chips, but you need a lot of them, you can now buy the gang's RP2040 microcontrollers directly from the farm supplier in lots of 500 or 3,400. Because the Raspberry Pi range is so cheap, people use lots of them – even in places where a complete Linux computer is arguably overkill. …
Never seen _much_ illumination from processor chips, but I do recall the days when, overwhelmed by the task of manually programming many EPROMs in a row of an evening, I occasionally plugged one into the low insertion force socket and pressed START. Chips inserted wrong end up (it happens) would emit a small amount of light to alert me to my mistake.
"LEM (Light Emitting Rom)"
I always wondered why he was called Lemmy. To think that if it had been Light Emitting Ron, we would all be fondly remember Lenny from Nötörhead.
Funnily enough, he spent much of his life skilling, skeeding and no doubt (when nobody was looking) peeding in the corner, without which he might well not have lived to the ripe old age of Shakespeare's "threescore years and ten". Göd rest his söul.
And if the programming voltage was too high above 12V charge got stuck so you couldn't erase the device.
The cure for that was to put the devices on a baking tray in an oven at 200C for an hour.
I had to do this for a few hundred because the 12V in my programmer was
*Cue Monty Python "Aye, we had it hard" sketch*
...as companies such as Adafruit and Pimoroni have been selling various units based on the RP2040 for a while now - and indeed individual chips. What's new seems to be the online "shop", presumably as an easier way for less well-established players to get in on the act?
M.
At this point in the game I'd be happy with a guarantee that I could design in any particular STM32 and expect to be able to order them in batches of 20 at any time; rather than see what I can buy, see it if suits and making a "last time buy" of as many as I can scrape funds together for.
It's got so bad that I'm even thinking of buying Microchip (Atmel) parts or NXP. :(
Digikey have 48,500 RP2040s in stock at time of writing. Shame it's no use to me...
It's got so bad that I'm even thinking of buying Microchip (Atmel) parts or NXP.
My current employer is using Microchip parts, I'm sorry to report that they too are as scarce as rocking horse poo. Probably you can get a chip from them, but one that's pin compatible with our design? Not easy. One that has the same pinout and all the features we need? even harder.