Around 20 bucks for the Wifi variant. 1GHz, 256MB RAM, USB OTG, GPIO and full Linux support while drawing less than 1W without any power optimizations and even supports < 15$ 2.8" LCDs out of the box.
And Rust can be compiled to be used with it...
https://github.com/scpcom/LicheeSG-Nano-Build/
Take a look at the `best-practise.md`.
It is also the base board of NanoKVM[1]
I'm currently prototyping a tiny portable audio player[1] which battery life could benefit a lot from this.
no such thing, 5V tolerant buffers will run you more than that
That said: it's a bit sad there's so little (if anything) in the space between microcontrollers & feature-packed Linux capable SoC's.
I mean: these days a multi-core, 64 bit CPU & a few GB's of RAM seems to be the absolute minimum for smartphones, tablets etc, let alone desktop style work. But remember ~y2k masses of people were using single core, sub-1GHz CPU's with a few hundred MB RAM or less. And running full-featured GUI's, Quake1/2/3 & co, web surfing etc etc on that. GUI's have been done on sub-1MB RAM machines once.
Microcontrollers otoh seem to top out on ~512KB RAM. I for one would love a part with integrated: # Multi-core, but 32 bit CPU. 8+ cores cost 'nothing' in this context. # Say, 8 MB+ RAM (up to a couple hundred MB) # Simple 2D graphics, maybe a blitter, some sound hw etc # A few options for display output. Like, DisplayPort & VGA.
Read: relative low-complexity, but with the speed & power efficient integration of modern IC's. The RP2350pc goes in this direction, but just isn't (quite) there.
Many dev boards provide 8 MB PSRAM.
The PIO units on the RP2040 are... overrated. Very hard to configure, badly documented and there's only 8 total. WS2812 control from the Pico is unreliable at best in my experience.