The Sinclair QL Forum

Peter wrote:At first glance, I don't see where the RP2040 can be bought as a chip, do you have a link?

I don't have a link for the purchase of the bare chips - they are only 7mm by 7mm apparently! The initial posting on the Raspberry Pi blog (https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbe ... w-on-sale/) says this right at the bottom:

FAQs

Are you planning to make RP2040 available to customers?
We hope to make RP2040 broadly available in the second quarter of 2021.

So, a wee while to wait.

HTH

Cheers,
Norm.

NormanDunbar wrote:I don't have a link for the purchase of the bare chips - they are only 7mm by 7mm apparently!

And 0.4 mm pitch unfortunately. Looks like they want to promote breakout board sales.
Another thing that hurts for QL use is lack of 5V tolerance. Many FPGA have clamp diodes that allow to overcome this by a series resistor, but I see nothing like that.

Hi Peter,

No, while it can be powered from 1.8 to 5V, it's definitely 3.3V on the pins etc. Like the Raspberry Pi is too.

Cheers,
Norm.

NormanDunbar wrote:No, while it can be powered from 1.8 to 5V, it's definitely 3.3V on the pins etc. Like the Raspberry Pi is too.

And as far as I saw the microcontroller itself can not be powered by 5V, that is done by an external converter.

Hi Petr,

Yes, sorry, my mistake. The Pico board can be powered as I mentioned but the microcontroller needs 3.3V and 1.1V. It converts the 3.3 internally to 1.1 itself.

Sorry about that.

Lots of interesting (and above my head) docs at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... g-started/ if anyone is interested.

Cheers,
Norm.

Oh wow, that is an interesting beast. I've been looking for over a year for a microcontroller that can act as an SPI slave @25Mhz. I haven't found the specs on that, but with the way IO is implemented this might be able to do it. Cool, will check one out when I find the time.

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp20 ... asheet.pdf is the microcontroller data sheet if you need it Marcel.

Cheers,
Norm.

Ok, this is a Pico running as a Spectrum 128:

https://twitter.com/kilograham5/status/ ... 09827?s=19 and please turn your sound up!

The bloke who did it is now working for Raspberry Pi.

Cheers,
Norm.