This is a bit of a Captain Obvious statement, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation's RP2040 is going to shake up the microcontroller space. I can't wait to play with this stuff. For the most part I stay within the Adafruit ecosystem. They are the "Easy Button" of microcontrollers. If you want to do stuff with out having an Electrical Engineering degree, Adafruit is hands down the way to go. They do so much documentation and easy to follow examples at learn.adafruit.com that you can self teach yourself how to work with microcontrollers.
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| Raspberry Pi Pico - RP2040 |
The RP2040/Pico is the first time where I feel like I could sail beyond the safe harbor of Adafruit. The open source and collaborative nature of the Pi foundation makes the information accessible and supported. Looking at the example projects on the Pi site for the pico you can quickly learn how to customize it to your own needs with ease.
Because of this open behavior of both Pi and AdaFruit you get some fantastic remixes and combinations of hardware. This kind of low cost, easy access and modification of the platform lets creative people do new and interesting things. Recently the FUZIX distribution was ported to the pico. MicroPython and CircuitPython is already ported. It won't be long and a simple and inexpensive wireless interface will be added to the mix and IOT will be in play.
Anyway I think over the next 2 years you're going to see more and more computing embedded into more devices. A great example of how the future products can change. The idea of a smart mirror started with people figuring out LCD monitors and Raspberry Pi's are cheap. Initially they were hacked together by industrious individuals. Then the open source projects to make it easier came along. Today you can get a home gym with a built in smart mirror for workouts. The low cost of the Pi computer made that possible. The Pico and RP2040 chip is going to do the same thing on a microcontroller level.
