microcontroller

The $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was announced today, with a new chip, the RP2350. This silicon improves on almost every aspect of the RP2040:

• 3 PIOs instead of 2
• 150 MHz instead of 133 MHz base clock
• Faster Arm Cortex M33 cores and RISC-V Hazard3 cores

I've had access to pre-release hardware and good news: even though the new chip is faster and has more features, it actually uses less power than RP2040, meaning if you run one of these things off a battery, it'll last longer.

I'll talk more about power later, but first, here's the specs.

Today, Raspberry Pi announced the Pico W, a new $6 version of the Pico that includes WiFi.

No word yet on Bluetooth. The WiFi chip in the Pico W (Infineon CYW43439) supports it, but right now the RP2040 firmware lacks Bluetooth support.

The Pico W being available for just $6 is huge, because one of the chief complaints about the original Pico (powered by Raspberry Pi's own RP2040) was its lack of wireless support—a feature present on similarly-priced boards based on the ESP32 and ESP8266.

A couple weeks ago, I glanced through my ever-growing collection of Raspberry Pi RP2040-based boards—pictured above are three of the boards I've tested: a Cytron Maker Pi RP2040, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a Seeed Studio Wio RP2040.

tl;dr: The Raspberry Pi Pico is a new $4 microcontroller board with a custom new dual-core 133 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ microprocessor, 2MB of built-in flash memory, 26 GPIO pins, an assortment of SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, PWM, and PIO channels.

It also has a few other party tricks, like edge castellations that make it easier to solder the Pico to other boards.

The Pico is powered by a new RP2040 chip—a brand new Raspberry-Pi-built ARM processor. And the best thing about this processor is the insanely-detailed Datasheet available on the Pico website that steps through every bit of the chip's architecture.

Video Review and 'Baby Safe Temperature' Project

I posted an entire video reviewing the Pico and demonstrating a MicroPython project. The video is embedded below: