pico

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.

Yesterday André Costa emailed me about his new website, rpilocator.

It's a website to track Raspberry Pi 4 model B, Compute Module 4, Pi Zero 2 W, and Pico availability across multiple retailers in different countries.

In his own words:

This database was created out of frustration trying to locate a Raspberry Pi product in the height of the chip and supply chain shortages of 2021. I got tired of visiting multiple websites every day trying to figure out if there were any Raspberry Pi's in stock. I coded this website in a few days during my spare time and had it hosted on a Raspberry Pi for a couple of weeks before deciding to make it publicly available. This is not hosted on a Raspberry Pi anymore.

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: