Announced in June 2021 the RP2040 is the first microcontroller designed by Raspberry Pi and, as such, marks a significant next step in the evolution of a technology that has delivered low-cost, easy-access computing to millions of users around the world since 2012.
As a company that has been delivering open industrial hardware built on Raspberry Pi since 2016, it was only natural that Sfera Labs would adopt the new MCU in some of its own solutions. To date, for instance, Sfera Labs has launched three products using the RP2040 – the Iono RP, which was the industry’s first industrial I/O module based on the new chip, the Exo Sense RP low-power edge-computing multi-sensor module and their most recent product announcement, the Iono RP D16, an industrial I/O module with 16 digital interfaces and the Raspberry Pi RP2040 at its core.
In line with the values associated with Raspberry Pi, the RP2040 is a powerful yet affordable MCU that has been designed to deliver maximum performance and optimized ease of use. This has been achieved through integration of a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, clocked at up to 133MHz. Combine this with 264kB of internal RAM and a very flexible input/output internal architecture with several standard interfaces and you have the perfect platform for versatile, small form factor, low-power, low-cost open industrial solutions such as the Iono RP and Exo Sense RP.
What’s more, choosing industrial solutions based on the RP2040 allows system architects and developers to tap into the extensive Raspberry Pi RP2040 development ecosystem, eliminating the need for proprietary libraries or drivers and allowing the rapid generation of code in C/C++ or MicroPython using their preferred IDE. The result is a platform that supports the rapid development and deployment of new automation and control applications optimized for specific use cases.
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