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Until now, Raspberry Pis RP2040 SoC has only been available in bulk to official partners and to some lucky makers who pitched their ideas directly to Eben Upton. Via the Raspberry Pi blog, June 1 marks the general availability of the RP2040 SoC, pulled forward three months, and for the bargain price of $1 a chip.
In a recent email exchange Raspberry Pi Trading CEO and co-founder Eben Upton confirmed to Tom's Hardware that today on June 1, there is general availability of the dual core Arm Cortex M0+ powered RP2040 for those wishing to add the powerful silicon to their projects. Upton explains that demand for the RP2040 is high. "Since launch, we've had a lot of people get in touch asking for RP2040 parts via our 'secret (sic) Twitter samples program'; some of these are maker businesses who have found themselves effectively unable to build products this year due to the global semiconductor shortage."
Upton later explains that based on this demand Raspberry Pi have pulled around 40,000 RP2040 units for general availability. Upton explains, "This will give people time to develop their projects and products, while we clear out the rest of the Pico backlog and scale up production of RP2040. In the autumn we'll have serious volume available to serve any resulting demand."
There are no shortage of eager makers looking to incorporate the RP2040 into their projects. Arturo182's RP2040 Stamp is a 1 inch square breakout designed to drop into a project, Seeed's Wio RP2040 is the cheapest way to get your RP2040 online and Guido Burger's RP2040 CO2 sensing ring is a novel means to measure your environment. All of these projects are powered by the RP2040.
The price of the RP2040 SoC is $1, but remember that this chip has no onboard storage so factor in the cost of external QSPI flash storage and make sure to leave enough space on your circuit board.
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
