Raspberry Pi releases Pico 2 W, a $7 wireless-enabled microcontroller board

Meet the Raspberry Pico 2 W, a small board designed around a microcontroller that lets you build hardware projects at scale. The Raspberry Pi also uses the RP2350, its own microcontroller, which is well documented.

But what is a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers allow you to control other electronic components or devices. Standard Raspberry Pis are general-purpose single-board computers, while microcontrollers are specifically designed to interface with other devices.

Microcontrollers tend to be cheaper, smaller and more powerful. As you can see in the picture above, the Pico 2 W has a bunch of input and output pins on the sides (small yellow holes around the board) that communicate with other components.

Hobbyists often start building a microcontroller-based project with a breadboard to avoid assembly. Later down the road, they may sell 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++, 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-core, dual-architecture processor running at 150MHz. When upgrading to a microcontroller, you can choose between a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open-hardware Hazard 3 RISC-V cores.

Arm Cortex-M33 cores are widely used in the microcontroller world, but some may prefer RISC-V cores. Everything is configurable in software, so you don’t have to choose one microcontroller over another when ordering new boards.

The Pico 2 W has 4 MB of on-board flash memory for storing your code, while the RP2350 features 520 KB of on-chip SRAM. Again, this is not a computer monster. It’s a microcontroller!

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 get 5GHz support for multitasking, but maybe we’ll get that in the next update.

If you don’t need the wireless features for price or certification compliance reasons, the Raspberry Pi also offers the Pico 2 without that functionality for $5.

Raspberry Pi products are widely used by industrial and electronic manufacturing companies. When Raspberry Pi went public this year, it reported that the industrial and embedded segment represented 72% of its sales.

It is possible why you can buy units with other Pico 2 boards, and reels of 480 units. This is what a reel of Pico 2 mini boards looks like: