The Raspberry Pi Pico is shaping up to be the most popular board of 2021 and while official partners are busy finishing off their range of RP2040 boards, other companies are starting development on their own. M5Stack, perhaps more notable for their modular ESP32 based M5Stick and M5Paper devices has posted a teaser to Twitter which suggests that they are working on their own 'Pi Silicon' based board.
In the tweet, M5Stack show a Raspberry Pi Pico on a laptop with a pinout sticker for one of their Espressif based boards. Is this hinting at a future M5Pico? It would appear so. In response to a direct question, M5Stack say "yes, m5pico is on the way".
What form could the M5Pico take? Could it be a custom RP2040 based board that sits in the product line up or could it be a breakout board for use with a Raspberry Pi Pico? We reached out to M5Stack for comment and their reply was "It is not a raspberry thing, all new, next month," which is rather cryptic. So right now we can only wait and see what future may bring.
The Raspberry Pi Pico and the RP2040 chip which powers it have rapidly become quite the success story. In just two months there have been over 1.1 million Raspberry Pi Pico orders taken, of which 400,000 have shipped. This leaves quite the growing backlog, but for partners and others wishing to embed the RP2040 into their product supplies are even shorter with only 60 to 80,000 chips manufactured per week.
For now we shall have to wait and see what M5Stack are up to. But if you can't wait that long, check out the Adafruit Feather RP2040, which is currently the best RP2040 board on the market.
