Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a tiny board designed round a microcontroller that permits you to construct {hardware} initiatives at scale. Raspberry Pi is as soon as once more utilizing the RP2350, its personal, well-documented microcontroller.
However what’s a microcontroller once more? Because the title suggests, microcontrollers allow you to management different digital parts or gadgets. Common Raspberry Pis are common goal single-board computer systems, whereas microcontrollers are particularly designed to work together with different issues.
Microcontrollers are usually low cost, small and really energy environment friendly. As you’ll be able to see within the image above, the Pico 2 W has dozens of enter and output pins on the perimeters (the small yellow holes throughout the board) with which it communicates with different parts.
Hobbyists normally begin creating a microcontroller-based venture with a breadboard to keep away from soldering. Later down the highway, they’ll solder the microcontroller to different elements.
Not like conventional Raspberry Pi computer systems, microcontrollers don’t run a full-fledged working system. Your code runs instantly on the chip.
Along with C and C++, the Pico 2 W helps MicroPython, a Python-inspired language for microcontrollers, for improvement. The brand new board retains {hardware} and software program compatibility with earlier technology boards.
The brand new $7 Pico 2 W encompasses a dual-core, dual-architecture processor operating at 150MHz. When creating for the microcontroller, you’ll be able to select between a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open-hardware Hazard 3 RISC-V cores.
Arm Cortex-M33 cores are extensively used within the microcontroller world, however some may desire RISC-V cores. Every part is configurable in software program, so that you don’t have to choose one microcontroller over the opposite if you order new boards.
The Pico 2 W has 4 MB of on-board flash reminiscence to retailer your code, whereas the RP2350 options 520 KB of on-chip SRAM. Once more, this isn’t a computing beast. It’s a microcontroller!
As for wi-fi capabilities, the Pico 2 W helps Wi-Fi (2.4GHz 802.11n) and Bluetooth 5.2. It might have been good to get 5GHz help for versatility, however possibly we’ll get that with the subsequent revision.
If you happen to don’t want wi-fi options for pricing or compliance certification causes, Raspberry Pi additionally affords the Pico 2 with out that performance for $5.
Raspberry Pi’s merchandise are being more and more utilized by industrial and electronics manufacturing corporations. When Raspberry Pi turned a public firm this yr, it reported that the economic and embedded section represented 72% of its gross sales.
That’s most likely why you should purchase particular person models of the Pico 2 boards, in addition to 480-unit reels. That is what a reel of Pico 2 microcontroller boards appears like:
