Pico Power: The Tiny Microcontroller

When is a computer not a computer: when it’s a microcontroller. To be fair, a computer, by its true definition, is an electronic device for storing and processing data, which is what the Pico does. But for most users, a computer is defined as a device that sits on a desk, something you can work and play on. This is where the Pico differs.

The Pico is something entirely different from the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s usual releases. Whereas the Raspberry Pi, now on version 4, is a small computer, and even the Compute Module and the Pi 400 are still just computers, the Pico is actually a microcontroller. A microcontroller is a processing unit that’s designed to work with programmable peripherals, and has input and output modules alongside a small amount of memory and storage capabilities. The processors are often scaled down, compared to the processor on a Raspberry Pi, or even inside your desktop computer, but powerful enough to complete basic tasks. Examples of a microcontroller in action can be found inside a washing machine, or traffic lights. A washing machine has no need for a quad-core processor, 8GB of memory, and the…

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Raspberry Pi Coding & Projects The Complete Manual (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 6

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