Just over a year after the release of the Raspberry Pi Pico, a new variation of the tiny board is coming to us… Wi-Fi to boot.
The Raspberry Pi foundation really has a knack for surprising us and for three years, more than ten months have never passed without a nice surprise. In 2019, it was obviously the Pi 4 Model B that caused a stir before even smaller machines came to us.
2.4 GHz single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi
Thus, in 2020, the Compute Model 4 – derived from the Pi 4 Model B – was launched and a few months later, it was the Raspberry Pi Pico and its simply tiny format which tumbled at a price of 4 dollars.
The foundation, however, had another card up its sleeve with this Wi-Fi version of the Pico. In principle, it is therefore a Pico like the 2020 model with this Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, its two ARM Cortex-M0+ cores, its 264 KB of SRAM and its 133 MHz frequency.
We also take advantage of 2 MB of flash memory embedded on the tiny PCB of the beast, a micro-USB 1.1 port and the famous 40-pin GPIO connector which is the success of the entire Raspberry Pi range.
Only here, the Raspberry Pi Pico W must justify this last letter. There for Wi-Fi, it assumes a wireless connection in 802.11n in 2.4 GHz. So there’s no question of going “too far” in Wi-Fi support, but it’s still a life-changer compared to the Raspberry Pi Pico.
The king of the Internet of Things?
This is all the more striking as the Raspberry Pi Foundation has managed to maintain a formidably aggressive entry price. It is certainly 50% more expensive than with the Pico “all short”, but at only 6 dollars each, the Pico W remains incredibly accessible.
For many readers, the question that remains will be ” What to do with such a component? “. You must first understand that the thing is designed, above all, for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Thereby, Tom’s Hardware is not stingy with projects to tame the beast. It is a question of setting up a Web server or embarking on the design of a network scanner. More fun, a plant monitoring tool makes sure you don’t miss a watering.
Finally, while the Compute Model 4 shortage is horrible and the Pi 4 Model B shortage isn’t very funny either, the Pico / Pico W range is easier to produce: stocks are solid.
Source : raspberry-pi
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