What is it? It's Raspberry Pi silicon (RP2040 microcontroller) and a board format (Raspberry Pi Pico®). Small, low-cost, has USB on-board, 2x M0+ ARM cores and 8x Programmable IO (PIO) cores which are dumb but amazingly useful state machines that can be SPI, I2C, I2S, VGA, LED Drivers or whatever we push it to do. They're the thing that really make this special. What are Pimoroni doing? We've been low-key waiting for Eben and Raspberry Pi to do something with microcontrollers for years, and we're not disappointed in the RP2040 and the support around it. As soon as we got word, we went full-on ..read more

Offers We'll be offering different chunky discounts from Mon 23 Nov. Up to 40% off on Pimoroni gear and discounts on hundreds of other choice items until they're all sold out. There is a new theme to the offers from Monday to Friday to avoid total overload, and then we'll throw open the hatches over the weekend with whatever hasn't been taken by hungry seagulls of bargains. Keep an eye on the shop front page for the latest info. Also!: A freebooter's tale Back in the mists of time, before Pimoroni was a thing, and the Raspberry Pi was a gleam in Eben Upton's eye, Sparkfun had a thing called F ..read more

Ahoy there fellow Makers and sea-farers. As you're all aware the world is in a strange place right now and it's likely to be a rough time for many people to deal with. We wanted to update you on what we're doing to keep our team safe and let you know what's happening at Pimoroni. What we're doing for our team Firstly (and most importantly) we need to look out for our crew mates and their families. These are the folks that design, produce, support, and ship you the products we make here in Sheffield-on-Sea. They are the heart and soul of Pimoroni and very dear to us. We have implemented the fol ..read more

We've made a very small contribution to the swag bag at Supercon 2019 in the form of our Super Dinky Blinky. On the surface, it's somewhat the antithesis of the usual swag, being little more than a super cheap microcontroller, a dome switch and some large pads. It blinks LEDs, that's it's function in life. Where it becomes interesting is in the microcontroller used, and some small work we've done to port the BSP to an open source compiler so that it can be used more easily. Niko and Paul will be wandering Supercon 2019 toting a couple of USB programmers if anyone want to have a play and chat ..read more

Without wanting to rain on your bonfire, let's start off with a fact: Fireworks and bonfires reduce visibility and increase air pollution. Photo by Lenny Acompanado / Unsplash Here in the UK, we celebrate a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament (aka Guy Fawkes' Night, or Bonfire Night) by burning a "Guy" on a bonfire and letting off fireworks. Last year, Sheffield's After Dark fireworks display was all but obscured by it's own pollution, and as one viewer put it - "It was the best fireworks display I've ever heard." The air pollution level reached 326 micrograms per cubic metre ..read more

We have been working with Games Britannia for a few years now, and one of our successful workshops has been based around designing an accessible controller. The Picade board was our starting point in previous years, allowing children to design individual buttons, and connect them to a board we made in order to play games on Retropie. Now, with the Player X, we could make a similar board that could be used by any device that recognises a USB controller. This year we used Player X boards with the university laptops, and also with the main computer hooked up to a projector. The workshop consis ..read more

If you've used the new Raspberry Pi 4, or read much about it, then you'll know that it can run pretty hot under high CPU load. Let's take a very quick look at it's thermal performance, and how a couple of different cooling options perform, in particular our new Fan SHIM. With each generation, the Raspberry Pi packs greater performance into a same-sized package, and the Raspberry Pi 4 is one of the most significant steps up so far. The Raspberry Pi 3 was known to run hot, but the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ dramatically improved thermal performance with a metal heat-spreader on the System-on-Chip (SoC ..read more

The new Raspberry Pi 4 is one of the most significant steps up in its short history. We'll give you the skinny on it, and tell you about some of over a dozen new Raspberry Pi 4 products in our shop today! All Mod Cons! Pi 4 is dramatically faster all-round, with a new 1.5GHz, 64-bit, quad-core, ARM Cortex-A72 CPU driving 2x faster performance, up to 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, Videocore VI enabling 4K video and dual displays, gigabit ethernet, USB 3.0, and more! It's now USB-C powered too, drawing up to 3A at 5V. The new ARM Cortex-A72, increased RAM, and 2x faster micro-SD performance, really open up wh ..read more

If you're anything like us, you have an extensive collection of cables. In our case, it's an excess of USB A to micro b cables. If you can't find the cable you want... make the cable you want. In this example, we've made one of our many many USB A to micro b cables into a USB A to JST connector cable. You will need: A USB A to micro b cable wire cutters wire strippers solder and a soldering iron heat shrink tubing (2 x small diameter, 1 x wide diameter) hot air gun or similar First, use the wire cutters to chop off the end you don't want (in our case the micro b end). Next, carefully strip ..read more