On 2024-04-20 8:33 p.m., Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:
For anything more sophisticated than your coffee pot the RP2040 from Raspberry Pie is a fantastic little chip, dual core 133 MHz Cortex M0+ with 8 PIO engines, 264K of RAM, ADC, UART, SPI, I2C all for under a dollar. I designed a fully functional RP2040 with 16 Mb flash for under $2.00. In large enough quantities that's encroaching on 8 bit PIC territory at over 1000 times the memory and CPU power.
I am wishing for a Quality Product, cheap crap is not always better. USB comes to mind. 256Kb ram is only 32K 64 bit words. Cache memory never works. My $5 internet toaster, just exploded after 3 days. So what? Just buy the new model that works with windows 12. Download a buggy new tool chain. The Z80 tools worked. The PDP8 was built to last. 50+ years and going strong. NOT the crappy PI PDP-8 or PDP-10. I give it 2 years max. Now a PI style computer with compact FLASH x 2, NO USB and 2 MEG ram , real serial and printer ports that will work in a noisy industrial setting, would be quite usefull. I'd pay even $3 for it. :)
