Official wireless Raspberry Pi Pico 2

Raspberry Pi has announced the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth version of its 21 x 51mm Pico 2 microcontroller board.

Called ‘Pico 2 W’, it shares the dual 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores, which can be replaced at boot by dual Hazard3 RISC-V processors.

Memory remains 520kbyte of on-chip SRAM plus 4Mbyte of on-board QSPI flash.

The added wireless interfaces are 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2.

The board’s 26 GPIO pins, include four that can be analogue inputs, 2x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I²C, 24x PWM and USB 1.1.

There are also 12 of the company’s PIO state machines.

Operation is over 1.8 – 5.5Vdc and -20 to +85°C.

For idustrial users, MTBF (mean time failure) data is provided: 182,000 hours in Ground Benign conditions, and 11,000 hours in Ground Mobile.

List price is $7, $2 more than the non-wireless ‘Pico 2’.

In September, Sheffield’s Pimoroni introduced a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth board of similar (53 x 21mm) dimensions using the same second-generation Raspberry Pi MCU – RP2350 –  and Raspberry Pi’s RM2 radio module, plus 16Mbyte of QSPI flash and 8Mbyte of ram. It is called ‘Pico Plus 2 W‘.

RP2350 has professional-grade security, including signed boot, 8kbyte of anti-fuse one-time key storage memory, SHA256 acceleration, a hardware true random number generator and glitch detectors. The Cortex-M33 cores also have the microcontroller version of Arm’s TrustZone virtualisation.