Space is a big place, with ample room for all kinds of activities that companies, researchers, and tourists might pay to pursue. And for many of those goals, SpaceX’s beefy Falcon rockets are overkill. Last week, two companies developing unique technologies specifically suited for more modest missions passed major milestones: Virgin Orbit launched nearly a dozen small satellites into orbit using an airplane-mounted rocket, and Blue Origin prepared to send astronauts to the edge of space with the fourteenth test of its New Shephard rocket, foreshadowing another year of growth for space companies large and small. Here’s what we have to look forward to.
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has so far focused its energy on microcomputers, but it’s now turning its attention to Arduino-style microcontrollers for your homebrew gadgets. The organization has introduced the Raspberry Pi Pico, a $4 board meant to offer a gentle entry point for microcontrollers. Think of it more as a complement to a Pi aimed at tasks like analog input.
It’s built on Raspberry Pi’s own in-house silicon, the RP2040. The dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ chip, 264KB of RAM and support for 16MB of off-flash memory (2MB is onboard) may not sound like much, but they’re reportedly powerful for the class with strong performance for tasks like machine learning. More importantly, it’s built to be flexible — the 30 GPIO pins, USB 1.1 controller (plus USB mass storage mode) and other additions should help it interface with with whatever project you’re working on.
The RP2040 is also part of a broader ecosystem. Adafruit, Pimoroni, SparkFun and even the Arduino team have developed boards tailored to more specific needs. One of Pimoroni’s devices may be the most interesting — the PicoSystem is a £58.50 (about $80) “handheld game-making experience” that has you programming a console even smaller than the Game Boy Micro.
Raspberry Pi Pico will be available in North America through Newark starting on January 25th. The RP2040 should be “broadly available” to customers sometime in the second quarter of 2021. This won’t necessarily up-end the Arduino market, but it won’t have to — it’s an alternative that could help you finish DIY creations and teach you a thing or two about code and hardware development.
