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Hardware Technology

Raspberry Pi's $7 Pico 2 W Microcontroller Board Adds Wireless Connectivity (engadget.com) 29

Raspberry Pi has announced the Pico 2 W, a wireless version of its Pico 2 microcontroller board built for hobbyists and industrial applications. From a report: At $7, it's a relatively inexpensive way to control electronic devices like smart home gadgets and robots. With the new version, users will be able to securely link to remote sources to send and receive data, either via Bluetooth 5.2 or Wi-Fi 802.11n.

As with the Pico 2, the wireless variant is built around the RP2350 microcontroller built in-house by Raspberry Pi. it offers more speed and memory than the original RP2040 chip, along with a security model built around Arm's TrustZone for Cortex-M. Users can program it using C, C++ and MicroPython, and choose between Arm Cortex-M33 or RISC-V cores.

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Raspberry Pi's $7 Pico 2 W Microcontroller Board Adds Wireless Connectivity

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  • by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Monday November 25, 2024 @12:39PM (#64970971) Homepage
    How does this compare to the (even cheaper) ESP8266 devices with WiFi that you can program through the Arduino IDE? They're even cheaper. Is the Pico 2 W faster? What's the differentiator?
    • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      I use ST devices because the motor control timers are awesome. Tensilica stuff doesn't come close. RP MCUs have a PIO state machines that can be adapted to many high speed IO applications. Peripherals, then, are a reason to look beyond ESP et al. Don't have any other big reasons.

      • Have you tried ESPs for the motor applications? Are ST's much better? I haven't used the STs, but looked into how you program them, and they looked like they required a bit of brain-shift over Arduino.

        • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

          Have you tried ESPs for the motor applications?

          Sure. You can do basic motor control work with an ESP. Basic, being the operative word. Peripherals are the real distinguishing feature among MCU vendors: Espressif has really great communication peripherals and software: when you need Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread, Zigbee, etc. you probably can't do better. ST, on the other hand, have about the best timer suite, DMA and event triggering peripherals available among the over-the-counter MCUs.

          The Advanced Control Timer (ACT) peripheral, available even in rat

    • Re:Comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Monday November 25, 2024 @01:11PM (#64971067)

      There's not much comparison. The Pico 2 is a much more capable microcontroller. The ESP32 line is more comparable, both in price and features, and the choice basically comes down to which set of peripherals you like best, and whether you want ARM or not.

      Both can be programed through the Arduino IDE using Arduino libraries.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        There's the ESP32-C3 if you want 160 MHz RISC-V and Bluetooth LE on top of WiFi (802.11 b, g, and n). I believe the Pico 2 W covers the same 2.4 GHz-only set of protocols.They're more like $3-4 for a ready to go dev board, so quite competitive with the Pico 2 W as long as the peripheral support and CPU performance is satisfactory for the intended project.

        For myself, I'm kind of tired of playing these vendor games with microcontrollers. I want a design to be generic and for there to be a wide number of vendo

    • It used to be "Why use a Pico? It doesn't have WiFi. What the hell?" Now it's "Why use a Pico? It's way more expensive than an ESP8266."

      But it's a massively more powerful device. It seems an odd position for a product, really. So many projects can work on cheap ESP devices, and if you're paying a bit, there are a few devices around with both full Linux for convenience and real-time behavior (the Milk V, mainly). Is your project really happiest in the middle?

      But the Pico is way, WAY more reputable tha

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      One major advantage of the ESP32 is that they make models with 5GHz radios.

      The RPi Pico W 2 seems to be rather old-fashioned. 2.4GHz only and a Micro USB connector, in 2024.

  • What's the market? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by algaeman ( 600564 )
    What's the value proposition here? I can buy the pico 2 w, which is a dual-core 133MHz chip for $7, or I can buy a Zero 2W which is a quad-core 64-bit 1GHz for $15. If I'm designing my own board, I am not likely to choose either, since I can't really guarantee availability of those chips.
    • by samwichse ( 1056268 ) on Monday November 25, 2024 @01:31PM (#64971119)

      For one thing, a zero 2w has about 45ma zombie power draw and over 400ma under load.
      A pico 2w is 10ua in deep sleep... I can't find specs for the 2w (but it's supposed to be more efficient than the w), but the pico w is 100ma peak draw and 2ma in
      light sleep. You can do mild tasks on a 2032 battery for a bit, even (although an Arduino is going to last about 1000x as long).

      So... slots in between an Arduino and Pi Zero for tasks. Not for everybody, but I could see some people wanting a faster microcontroller like this.

    • It is half as capable as the Zero 2W at half the price? If you are buying one that price difference is negligible. If you are buying 100, that might be worth considering.
      • by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Monday November 25, 2024 @04:34PM (#64971749)

        The capabilities can't be compared, because they're note comparable products. A microcontroller won't be running the same code as a full-blown ARM64 SoC. The Pi Zero 2's CPU is many times faster, but the Pi Pico 2 can idle at orders of magnitude lower power levels, and the hardware programmable IO state machine on the Pico can't be replicated by the Pi Zero 2 in software.

        • I had not encountered the PIO system. That sounds awesome!

        • Nowhere did I say that the two were remotely the same. Nowhere did I say they would be running the same code.
          • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            You said that it was "half as capable at half the price. That's a quite direct comparison. The Zero 2W has around a thousand times as much memory, it's not remotely half as capable. They don't have the same instruction sets. They *can't* run the same software. There isn't really any overlap in workloads. They're used for completely different and unrelated purposes.

    • What's the value proposition here? I can buy the pico 2 w, which is a dual-core 133MHz chip for $7, or I can buy a Zero 2W which is a quad-core 64-bit 1GHz for $15.

      Chainsaw vs. laser cutter -- each does things the other can't.

      The Zero 2W can run a standard, full-blown operating system with full TCP/IP stack, USB, HDMI and all that, and install software with apt-get, but its GPIO functionality is pretty limited and slowish.

      The Picos on the other hand are programmed for a specific purpose, and have excellent GPIO functionality, thanks to their PIO peripheral which gives you dedicated state-machines with DMA to handle heavy-load and timing-critical I/O functions.

      I mostly

    • by cjameshuff ( 624879 ) on Monday November 25, 2024 @09:28PM (#64972511) Homepage

      This is a microcontroller, not an embedded Linux SoC. It has a minuscule fraction of the power consumption, runs a simple RTOS, and can achieve levels of determinism, latency, and timing precision that are impractical with a full Linux OS running on the chip. A microcontroller can bit-bang protocols at speeds the Zero 2W couldn't match, or which it simply couldn't manage the timing requirements for. The programmable PIO stuff enhances those advantages.

      The Cortex M0+ of the RP2040 was rather underpowered, though. Its main use is in very tiny systems where transistor count or power consumption are the main considerations. The M33 is a much more capable microcontroller, with things like hardware integer division and a FPU.

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