The Raspberry Pi Pico: The Tiny Titan of Tinkerers
In the world of technology, we often equate power with size and price. We imagine that a more capable computer must be a larger, more expensive one. For years, the Raspberry Pi Foundation masterfully challenged this notion with their line of single-board computers, bringing affordable, credit-card-sized power to millions. But in 2021, they turned the tables once again, shifting the goalposts from "credit-card-sized" to "gumstick-sized" with a device that wasn't just a smaller computer, but a different kind of beast entirely: the Raspberry Pi Pico . This wasn't another incremental update. It was a declaration, an entry into a new category that would democratize microcontroller programming with the same fervor their original boards had for general computing. Priced at an almost unbelievable four dollars, the Pico was more than a product; it was an invitation. It lowered the barrier to entry so dramatically that experimentation felt not just accessible, but e...