The Raspberry Pi Foundation has unveiled the Pico W, an updated development board based on the RP2040 microcontroller with built-in Wi-Fi. The price was raised from four dollars to six. The rest of the board was not changed and everything was left as it was.
The Raspberry Pi Pico W is based on the proprietary RP2040 microcontroller, which was previously used in the Pico baseboard and boards from other manufacturers. The company's blog post says it has sold almost two million Raspberry Pi Pico boards since launch, but developers have often complained that separate modules need to be plugged into the board for wireless data transfer, and this increases the size of homemade products.
The company solved this problem by releasing the Raspberry Pi Pico W. The wireless connection is provided by the Infineon CYW43439 Wi-Fi chip, which operates on the 802.11n protocol with a clock frequency of 2.4 GHz. It is noteworthy that the chip supports Bluetooth, but this feature is disabled by software. In a company blog, they said that in order to add Bluetooth to devices, one more stage of certification must be passed, and the company has not had time to do this yet. The Raspberry Pi Foundation may enable Bluetooth on the Pico W soon.
Along with this, the company introduced the Pico H board, which is a classic Pico, but with an additional three-pin connector for debugging. They also announced Pico WH - a board with a debug connector and Wi-Fi support.
The board prices are as follows:
- Pico - $4
- Pico W - $6;
- Pico H - $5;
- Pico WH - $7.
Michael Zippo
2022/07/01
https://linkedin.com/in/michael-zippo-9136441b1
[email protected]
Sources: Python.Engineering, Raspberrypi.com