The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new version of its Pico microcontroller, this time with WiFi.
The Pico W costs $6, compared to the $4 the company charged for the original Pico, but it’s unlikely to concern builders who can now take advantage of built-in network access thanks to the Infineon CYW43439 chip that also supports Bluetooth, but it isn’t. t possible yet.
The Pico, announced in January of last year, was the first Raspberry Pi minicomputer to run on its own silicon. The RP2040 is built based on TSMC’s low-power 40nm process and includes a pair of 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores and 264KB of on-chip SRAM.
Aiden Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi, says the enterprise has sold 2 million pecos so far, because it’s perfect for popular Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
This means that W is likely to be snapped up, not just by the company’s traditional base of hobbyists and home bakers, but small businesses looking to build products at scale. It is especially useful for those people due to the limitations in traditional supply chains.
That extra dollar could hurt the cost of that merchandise bill significantly, but the $4 Pico will still be available to those people who don’t need internet access.
“Fast cores, large memory, and flexible interaction make the RP2040 a natural building block for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. But Pico itself has one obvious missing feature for the Internet of Things: a way to connect to the network. Now, that’s about to change,” Upton said in the blog post.