The Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and we’ve become plenty familiar with the Pi Pico in the last three years as well. Still, these devices have a great deal of potential if you know where to look. If you wade beyond the official datasheets, you might even find more than you expected.
Kumar is presently a software engineer with Google, having previously worked for Analog Devices earlier in his career. But more than that, Kumar has been doing a deep dive into maxing out the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi and the Pi Pico, and shared some great findings in an excellent talk at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.
Under The Hood
Kumar begins by noting that a great many resources went into the creation of this talk. Worthy of note are Jeremy Bentham’s blog, which provided plenty of details on the Raspberry Pi and the workings of the Secondary Memory Interface (SMI). Beyond that, the Pi Pico documentation proved fruitful, as did several logic analyzer projects from out in the wild. Kumar collated this knowledge along with plenty of research, and put together a guide to some of the deeper functionality of the hardware with regards to the concept of a Pi Pico-based logic analyzer capable of running at 100 megasamples per second.
Kumar’s concept is for a hat that has an RP2040 connected to the Raspberry Pi via the SMI interface. It in turn is controlled via its debug pins.
Kumar notes the RP2040 chip at its heart has the useful Programmable I/O (PIO) subsystem, which allows for doing various I/O and data tasks ..
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