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Meet Raspberry Pi Pico 2Wa small board designed around a microcontroller that allows you to create large-scale hardware projects. The Raspberry Pi again uses its own RP2350, Well documented Controller.
But what is a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers allow you to control components or other electronic devices. Regular Raspberry Pis are general-purpose single-board computers, while microcontrollers are specifically designed to interface with other things.
Microcontrollers tend to be cheap, small, and very power efficient. As you can see in the image above, the Pico 2 W has dozens of input and output ports on the sides (the little yellow holes found all over the board) through which it communicates with other components.
Hobbyists usually start developing a microcontroller-based project with The board To avoid welding. Later, they can solder the microcontroller to other parts.
Unlike traditional Raspberry Pi computers, microcontrollers do not run a full operating system. Your code runs directly on the chip.
In addition to C and C++, the Pico 2 W supports MicroPython, a Python-inspired language for microcontrollers, for development. The new board maintains hardware and software compatibility with previous generation boards.
The new $7 Pico 2 W features a dual-architecture dual-core processor running at 150MHz. When developing for a microcontroller, you can choose between a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of Hazard 3 RISC-V cores for open hardware.
Arm Cortex-M33 cores are widely used in the microcontroller world, but some may prefer RISC-V cores. Everything is configurable in the software, so you don’t have to choose one microcontroller over another when ordering new boards.
The Pico 2 W has 4MB of on-board flash memory to store your code, while the RP2350 features 520KB of on-board SRAM. Again, this is not a computing beast. She’s a controller!
As for wireless capabilities, the Pico 2 W supports Wi-Fi (2.4GHz 802.11n) and Bluetooth 5.2. It would have been nice to have 5GHz support for versatility, but maybe we’ll get that with the next review.
If you don’t need wireless features for price or compliance certification reasons, Raspberry Pi also offers the Pico 2 without this functionality for $5.
Raspberry Pi products are increasingly used by industrial companies and electronics manufacturers. When Raspberry Pi went public this year, it reported that the industrial and embedded segment represented 72% of its sales.
Perhaps that’s why you can buy single units of Pico 2 panels, as well as 480-unit reels. This is what the Pico 2 microcontroller reel looks like:
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