Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a tiny board designed around a microcontroller that lets you build hardware projects at scale. Raspberry Pi is once again using the RP2350, its own, well-documented microcontroller.
But what is a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers let you control other electronic components or devices. Regular Raspberry Pis are general purpose single-board computers, while microcontrollers are specifically designed to interact with other things.
Microcontrollers tend to be cheap, small and very power efficient. As you can see in the picture above, the Pico 2 W has dozens of input and output pins on the sides (the small yellow holes all around the board) with which it communicates with other components.
Hobbyists usually start developing a microcontroller-based project with a breadboard to avoid soldering. Later down the road, they can solder the microcontroller to other parts.
Unlike traditional Raspberry Pi computers, microcontrollers don’t run a full-fledged operating system. Your code runs directly on the chip.
In addition to C and C++, the Pico 2 W supports MicroPython, a Python-inspired language for microcontrollers, for development. The new board retains hardware and software compatibility with previous generation boards.
The new $7 Pico 2 W features a dual-core, dual-architecture processor running at 150MHz. When developing for the microcontroller, you can choose between a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open-hardware Hazard 3 RISC-V cores.
Arm Cortex-M33 cores are widely used in the microcontroller world, but some might prefer RISC-V cores. Everything is configurable in software, so you don’t have to pick one microcontroller over the other when you order new boards.
The Pico 2 W has 4 MB of on-board flash memory to store your code, while the RP2350 features 520 KB of on-chip SRAM. Again, this is not a computing beast. It’s a microcontroller!
As for wireless capabilities, the Pico 2 W supports Wi-Fi (2.4GHz 802.11n) and Bluetooth 5.2. It would have been nice to get 5GHz support for versatility, but maybe we’ll get that with the next revision.
If you don’t need wireless features for pricing or compliance certification reasons, Raspberry Pi also offers the Pico 2 without that functionality for $5.
Raspberry Pi’s products are being increasingly used by industrial and electronics manufacturing companies. When Raspberry Pi became a public company this year, it reported that the industrial and embedded segment represented 72% of its sales.
That’s probably why you can buy individual units of the Pico 2 boards, as well as 480-unit reels. This is what a reel of Pico 2 microcontroller boards looks like:
