Raspberry Pi Pico W is the new board from the British foundation behind this group of microcomputers that leads the SBC segment. It only costs 6 dollars and adds Wi-Fi support as a major novelty.
If you remember, the Raspberry Pi Pico was a variant of the single board computer for IoT systems. When it was first released a year and a half ago, it offered a micro USB port and GPIO pins, but what it didn’t have was any wireless capability.
Now, maintaining the low power, size, and price of the original, the Raspberry Pi Pico W adds built-in support for Wi-Fi wireless networks. Wireless capabilities are limited to 2.4 GHz single-band 802.11/b/g/n connections, but still a big step ahead of the original that needed additional hardware to connect to the Internet.
The rest of the characteristics are maintained, starting with the RP2040 chip, a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ clocked at 133 MHz, 264 KB SRAM, and support for up to 16 MB of off-chip Flash memory via a dedicated QSPI bus.
Its consumption is minimal and the microcontroller has its own power supply, which admits voltages between 1.8 and 5.5 watts, so to start it up, two or three AA batteries or a small rechargeable battery are enough. The board also features 2 MB onboard flash memory, a micro USB 1.1 port, and a 40-pin GPIO header.
Raspberry Pi Pico W is priced at just 6 dollars, accessible to anyone, although it must be said that it has risen 50% from the 4 dollars of the original version that will also continue to be sold. In addition to this version, the foundation will market an ‘H’ version that for $7 will add a header mounted and a 3-pin debug connector.
The new versions will be available throughout the month of July and can already be reserved at retailers such as Canakit or PiShop.
