Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a tiny board designed round a microcontroller that allows 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 identify suggests, microcontrollers allow you to management different digital parts or units. Common Raspberry Pis are normal objective single-board computer systems, whereas microcontrollers are particularly designed to work together with different issues.
Microcontrollers are typically low-cost, small and really energy environment friendly. As you possibly can 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 often begin creating a microcontroller-based venture with a breadboard to keep away from soldering. Later down the street, they’ll solder the microcontroller to different components.
In contrast to 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 growth. The brand new board retains {hardware} and software program compatibility with earlier era boards.
The brand new $7 Pico 2 W contains a dual-core, dual-architecture processor working at 150MHz. When creating for the microcontroller, you possibly can 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 broadly used within the microcontroller world, however some would possibly choose RISC-V cores. The whole lot is configurable in software program, so that you don’t have to select 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 will have been good to get 5GHz assist for versatility, however possibly we’ll get that with the following revision.
Should you don’t want wi-fi options for pricing or compliance certification causes, Raspberry Pi additionally presents 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 in all probability why you should purchase particular person items of the Pico 2 boards, in addition to 480-unit reels. That is what a reel of Pico 2 microcontroller boards appears to be like like:
