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

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.

Comparison

[RobinH]

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?

Re:

[Tailhook]

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.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

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.

What's the market?

[algaeman]

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.

Re:What's the market?

[samwichse]

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.

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[UnknowingFool]

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.

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[Guspaz]

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.

Re:

[DeanonymizedCoward]

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

trustzone

[Jrabbit05]

why call out the tpm here most people have a wrong perception of what it even does.

Re:

[ChunderDownunder]

Well it's a British company, so if you commit a sinister act they send around Dame Judy Dench from the James Bond franchise to whip your backside!

Curiously it includes two cores on the one die - the TrustZone stuff is presumably disabled when you enter Risc-V.

Low Power Solution

[slime_Not]

Why is speed always brought up in microcontrollers? Power, connectivity, then speed was be a nice metric order to deliver on. Of course wifi is a power hog, and BT is range limited. In most applications, these processors have plenty of speed to spare. It would be great to have a lorad option for a change, to allow for feasible battery/portability solutions.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

Certainly no one should expect these microcontrollers to do video editing or play the latest games; however, reporting on typical workload these controllers are capable gives the buyer an informed choice. For example this board might be good enough to make a 2 bay NAS as long at that is the main function. It should not be used as a NAS and transcoding Plex server.

Re:

[Guspaz]

Nobody is using a microcontroller for a NAS, or running "typical workloads". We're talking about a chip with kilobytes of RAM. Most microcontrollers don't even have an FPU. You write baremetal code for these things, maybe with some sort of thin realtime OS on it.

Re:

[gweihir]

Why is speed always brought up in microcontrollers?

Because that is all tech "journalists" can "understand".

Incidentally, the RP2050 has a known bug with its GPIO and hence staying on the RP2040 may be advisable in most cases.