Connectivityįor the launch, Raspberry Pi has primarily concentrated on the MicroPython experience. With both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios technically addressable over the SPI bus, though, Bluetooth support could well follow in a future firmware update. The eagle-eyed may have noticed a disconnect between the CYW43439's capabilities and Raspberry Pi's announcement on the matter: While the CYW43439 is a combined Bluetooth 5.2 and single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi radio, only the latter is available on the Raspberry Pi Pico W - for the moment, at least. It's a technical quirk of note only to those diving deeper into bare-metal programming: for MicroPython users, it's still accessible using the pin alias LED. There is one change to the pinout which should be noted, however, but it's not visible externally: the Raspberry Pi Pico W's on-board user-addressable LED has shifted away from an internal GPIO on the RP2040 microcontroller to one on the CYW43439 radio module.

That means a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor running at up to 133MHz, though capable of significantly more when run out-of-spec, along with 264kB of static RAM (SRAM). The RP2040 at the heart of the new Raspberry Pi Pico W is, aside from a stepping jump from the launch-model B0 to the latest B2, identical to the original.

Just as with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which followed the Raspberry Pi Zero's launch, that single letter hints at a major upgrade: the addition of wireless connectivity.

Now, around a year and a half on, there's a successor - not the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, but the Raspberry Pi Pico W. With a powerful dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, plenty of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) capabilities, out-of-the-box support for C/C++ and MicroPython, and clever programmable input/output (PIO) blocks should you run out of peripherals, its feature set belied its bargain-basement $4 price. When Raspberry Pi launched its first-ever microcontroller and matching development board, the RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico respectively, it proved an immediate smash-hit.

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