So the faulty ADC (nonlinearity issues) of RP2040 is the only thing you can list and that makes it "low quality shit"?
I implore you to open up the errata sheet of stm32g4, just the ADC section alone (or frankly any stm32 mcu) (https://blog.mjbots.com/2023/07/24/stm32g4-adc-performance-p...), and that's an MCU series with focus on analog peripherals.
Stm32 chips are plagued with all sorts of issues and hardware bugs that are very easy to run into. In comparison rp2040 has surprisingly few major defects apart from its ADC implementation.
I see no mention of exact part number of inductor requirement in their hardware design guide, are you making shit up now? They are somewhat more particular in oscillator selection, and unfortunately don't include factory trimmed RC oscillator like most MCUs do these days.
> PIO does not unlock much actual capabilities besides party tricks
Ok, so you've no idea what you're talking about.
RP2040 is widely used in many projects because it has insane bandwidth for MCU in its price category. It can do 4 x 32bit reads/writes per cycle (if those ops are spread across 64kb x 4 memory banks), at 200mhz base clock, which gives theoretical maximum of 3.2 gigabytes per second bandwidth. That is pretty crazy.
This enables you to interface with or easily emulate many highspeed interfaces. And do things like 24ch 400mhz logic analyzers and similar. And this is what they are commonly used for (emulating memory cards, etc)
And that's a 60cent MCU. In this price range MCUs don't have 264kb of SRAM and 133/200mhz much less with two cores, that can push anywhere remotely this insane amount of bandwidth.
rp2040 additionally has human friendly and readable documentation, with truckloads of examples, and API that's pleasant to use. (can't exactly be said about stm32 ref manuals and APIs).
While it is not perfect (rp2040 ADC, and lacks encryption), some of those shortcomings have already been addressed in rp2350, with double sram (520KB at this price point!), floating point, even more PIO, more improved DMA channels and so on.
While cheap py32, gd32, apm32, etc are cool, but they just generic arm32 m0/m4. A 10 cent 24mhz m0 puya with 3kbs sram, isn't particularly impressive when put next to 60cent rp2040 with 80x sram, etc
> Combined with the general culture of people hyping RPi Pico chips, it results in a culture of ignorance and hype.
You haven't opend an errata sheet of stm32 chips even once and you talk about ignorance.
rp2040/rp2350 are unironically one of the best MCUs on the market (esp. in their niche), both in documentation/API and price/perf and features/flexibility in doing highspeed interfaces/bandwidth.
I have read the docs, and like I said the point of STM32 is ubiquity. It's not a great design in other respects but it was once ahead of the envelope and that made it ubiquitous which made it king for longevity. There is no room for another "king" on that throne. Especially counting all the clones of STM32, it is basically a forever design.
Comparing a 60 cent chip to a 10 cent chip is itself crazy work. That's like a whole three stratums apart in terms of capability. Dammingly, you are forgetting about the cost of the external flash that it requires, when program flash is the main cost of MCUs. It shows you don't have much experience with this stuff.
> I see no mention of exact part number of inductor requirement in their hardware design guide, are you making shit up now?
LMFAO go read the literal datasheet page 455 https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...
They literally had to "work with Abracon to create a custom 2.0×1.6mm 3.3μH polarity marked inductor" like wtf
Besides how it looks like you weren't one of the early adopters (since RPi shipped one abracon inductor with every one RP2350 for a bit), you also clearly haven't designed a board with the chip in question.
> theoretical maximum of 3.2 gigabytes per second bandwidth. That is pretty crazy.
This is what I'm talking about, like honestly what capability does that unlock for you beside party tricks? Can you name anything meaningful beside "logic analyzer" and "some memory card?" Even disregarding that, what can you do with such thruput if you are bottled by USB 1 speeds and a core without FPU? It doesn't come close to being able to do interesting things like LVDS ADCs or actual high speed memory interfaces because of the bit width requirement, yet people will go into a frothing frenzy should you dare insinuate that RPi Pico might be kinda useless
> rp2040/rp2350 are unironically one of the best MCUs on the market (esp. in their niche), both in documentation/API and price/perf and features/flexibility in doing highspeed interfaces/bandwidth.
As you might surmise, I disagree. Go make some actual projects instead of "reading the docs" all day (though I must admit I do the same). Also, it sure looks like our definition of high speed differs by a wide margin