The Raspberry Pi Pico W builds upon the great cost-for-performance metrics of the Pico and add WiFi to the board. The Pico W features the same attributes as the Raspberry Pi Pico and also incorporates an Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip. CYW43439 supports IEEE 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN, and Bluetooth® 5.2, supporting Bluetooth® Classic and Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) functionality - with the temporary exception of ACL/SCO — along with both the BLE Central and Peripheral roles. Things are also configurable so you can enable Bluetooth® Classic and BLE either individually, or have both of them available at the same time.
The Raspberry Pi Pico line is a low-cost, high-performance microcontroller board with flexible digital interfaces. It feature the RP2040 which marks Raspberry Pi's first microcontroller designed in-house. Pico provides minimal (yet flexible) external circuitry to support the RP2040 chip (Flash, crystal, power supplies and decoupling and USB connector). The majority of the RP2040 microcontroller pins are brought to the user IO pins on the left and right edge of the board. Four RP2040 IO are used for internal functions - driving an LED, on-board Switched Mode Power Supply (SMPS) power control and sensing the system voltages.
Pico uses an on-board buck-boost SMPS which is able to generate the required 3.3 volts (to power RP2040 and externalcircuitry) from a wide range of input voltages (~1.8 to 5.5V). This allows significant flexibility in powering the unit from various sources such as a single Lithium-Ion cell, or three AA cells in series. Battery chargers can also be very easily integrated with the Pico powerchain. Reprogramming the Pico's flash memory can be done using USB (simply drag and drop a file onto the Pico which appears as a mass storage device) or via the Serial Wire Debug (SWD) port. The SWD port can also be used to interactively debug coderunning on the RP2040
Pico has been designed to use either soldered 0.1" pin-headers (it is one 0.1" pitch wider than a standard 40-pin DIP package) or can be used as a surface mountable "module", as the user IO pins are also castellated. There are SMT pads underneath the USB connector and BOOTSEL button, which allow these signals to be accessed if used as a reflow-soldered SMT module.
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Based on 25 ratings:
1 of 1 found this helpful:
I picked this up because why not at this price? I followed this tutorial https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/get-started-pico-w and had it working in under 10 minutes. The ability to have wi-fi on a microcontroller like this in the Raspberry Pi family is too great to pass up. Now to find a proper project for it!
This thing is fast! I've moved over from other microelectronics that have rather limited memory and cpu power compared to this. It's a breath of fresh air to have a little more breathing room when writing code.
Sweet!
I am thrilled with this unit. More powerful than I ever imagined an embedded system to be with all the wireless connections I crave (soon). Programming is easy. I've been using ESP32 for my systems but this is a better solution with more capability. Lots of I/O, most of the standard interfaces. Looking forward to using the clock more after some experimentation.
Only drawbacks are the amount of flash (which I expect to change) and missing I2S.
It seems impossible that this is so inexpensive....
Haven't finished testing it but it appears to perform pretty well.
Micropython speeds up development. Hopefully there will be better availability soon.
Product is great, shipping was incredibly slow
I am replacing the Raspberry pi pico with the pico W on my automated Pizza Press. Working towards a web app that lets one watch the pizza dough being pressed into a perfect 12" pie to the desired thickness on a web app. The pico controls the press motor and reads the load gauges and controls the platen temperature by the temperature of the dough this and the web cam is sent to the web app. One can adjust the pressure to get the correct thickness of the dough for a perfect pizza every time.
Works great. If you are used to circuit python it will run circuit python. I decided to try out micro python and It seems easier to use with git. Currently it doesn’t populate as flash storage but there is a python utility for copying files to the pico w. It connected to the WI-FI on the first try.
So far so good. Nice and small; low power; easy to figure out and program.
0 of 1 found this helpful:
I haven't really understood why the RP2040 has been getting so much attention, because realistically what does it do that any other ARM microcontroller doesn't?
With the addition of Wi-Fi, it becomes something a little more interesting, but it's really a breadboard toy, it's not really easy to build into a project, plus the relative lack of flash or RAM makes it difficult to do network-based loads.
I also would like a hardware reset switch.
It's been a month since I placed the order and I still haven't received it. Delivery seems to have stopped during on the way, but FedEx doesn't tell me the reason. What should I do?
Fill this quick form out https://www.sparkfun.com/support and we can check
This is the best Raspberry pi I have owned. A must buy for your build kit.
I've been waiting a while for the PicoW to become available again. Sometimes you need just a little CPU and WIFI that's capable of very low power intermittent operation. The W falls nicely into this niche at a good price point. Since it uses standard libraries and tools it is a breeze to "What If" prototype something and get a sense for the fit. I can think of dozens of uses where it is just enough more capability than the trusty go to the ESP8266.
Both chips worked perfectly out of the box. Devices will be evaluated for bioelectrical/nonmedical application. Thanks for your continued support and timely service.
These are great little IoT devices for Maker experimenting. Good for learning micropython, web server tinkering, sensor/IoT type projects. Convenient to use. Pretty good docs and project examples online.
Glad to have this while we wait for full Raspberry Pi's to come back.
MicroPython support and the ease of programming over USB makes using a pleasure
My soldering skills aren’t what they used to be so next time I may go with pre-soldered headers.
I built a macro pad with cherry mx switches. I 3d printed the base and key caps and wired them all to the pico inside it. Works great!
Adding WiFi connectivity to the Pico board is a great addition to an already very capable board. With its dual Cortex-M0 cores I can have my application running on one core while handling the network activity with the other.
The first thing I did was upload the MicroPython firmware. With the Pico, I wrote everything in C, but with the Pico W, I decided to use Python. Very easy to make a web server to control a couple of relays for my project. I used Thonny at first, but then it decided to "upgrade" the MicroPython to the standard Pico version, and couldn't get over it, so I switched to PyCharm. Great board. Great price. I'll be using them a lot.
Shipping was excellent 👍 product was packaged great 👍 what I love most is how easy it is to read the gpio pinout map I'm looking forward to making a pi drone and adding extra parts to my home security...
Does it use a micro USB? One might think it's USB-C as of 2022.
The datasheet says micro-USB.