New product Pico Product launches! In January last year, Raspberry Pi launched the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico, Their first product built on silicon designed by Raspberry Pi. At its heart is the RP2040 microcontroller, built on TSMC`s 40nm low-power process, incorporating two 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores, 264kB of on-chip SRAM and a unique programmable I/O subsystem.
Since launch, we`ve sold nearly two million Pico boards, and RP2040 has found its way into a huge number of third-party products. Fast cores, large memory, and flexible interfacing make RP2040 a natural building block for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. But, until now, Pico needed an external module to connect to the outside world. Well, not any more...
Today, we're launching three new members of the Pico family. The first is the Raspberry Pi Pico W bringing 802.11n wireless networking to the Pico platform, while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling. Like all modern Raspberry Pi boards, the radio circuitry is encapsulated in a metal shield can, reducing compliance costs for customers who want to integrate it into their own products.
Eagle-eyed readers of datasheets will notice that the CYW43439 wireless chip from Infineon supports both Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low-Energy. However, Bluetooth is not enabled on Pico W at launch, but may be in the future. Watch this space...
The second product launch is the Pico H, which is the existing Pico with pre-soldered headers. A Pico WH will follow in August which offers both new features on the same board.
Here's a short video introducing the new members of the Pico family:
Software and documentation
For C developers, today`s release of the Pico SDK includes wireless networking support. The network stack is built around lwIP, and uses libcyw43 from Damien George (of MicroPython fame) to communicate with the wireless chip. By default, libcyw43 is licensed for non-commercial use, but Pico W users, and anyone else who builds their product around RP2040 and CYW43439, benefit from a free commercial-use license.
MicroPython users can download an updated UF2 image with networking support for Pico W. This UF2 firmware we`re making available for Pico W is a separate build to the existing MicroPython firmware for our original Pico board.
Read more about the Pico release on the Ineltek website here and, as always, if you're interested in designing in the RP2040 or a Pico board to your next project - contact us now.