Comment by cellularmitosis
12 days ago
Yeah, that's what sets the RP2040 apart from other micros. I think of it as being analogous to the recent advent of "software-defined radio" -- the RP2040's PIO are fast enough to allow for software-defined Composite video, software-defined VGA, software-defined DVI, software-defined USB, etc etc etc.
What other micros are you talking about? STM32 can easily do it (I suspect that any ARM based micro can), and I've seen some vga libraries for ESP32. There's not much special about the RP2040 other than it's price and brand name.
On other typical 32b MCUs you end up doing this kind of bitbanging purely from software, while RP2040 has the PIO which is kind of programmable bitbanging accelerator. Similar hardware blocks in other MCUs are either single-purpose (think USART), or much more limited and mostly only found weird automotive parts.
I spent two hours trying to get hello world working on stm32 , on a pi it takes two minutes. its about barrier to entry not about quality of hardware. Same thing when Arduino came out people was saying so what its just an avr or whatever.