NEW PRODUCT – Raspberry Pi Pico 2W

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Raspberry Pi Pico 2W is Raspberry Pi Foundation’s update to their popular RP2040-based wireless ico board, now built on RP2350: their new high-performance, secure microcontroller. With a higher core clock speed, double the on-chip SRAM (512KB), double the on-board flash memory (4MB!), more powerful Arm M33 cores, new security and low-power features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature boost while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Raspberry Pi Pico series.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2W brings WiFi + BLE wireless networking to the Pico 2 platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling. It adds on-board single-band 2.4GHz wireless interfaces (802.11n) using the Infineon CYW43439 while retaining the Pico form factor. The on-board 2.4GHz wireless interface has the following features:

• Wireless (802.11n), Single-band (2.4 GHz) WiFi with WPA3 and Soft Access Point supporting up to 4 clients
• Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth Classic – note not all programming methods support BLE or BT
• The wireless interface is connected via SPI to the RP2350 microcontroller and has a micropython/circuitpython/Arduino driver for wireless capability

Due to pin limitations (the Pico2  brings out all the GPIO) some of the wireless interface pins are shared with the exposed pads:

• The SPI CLK is shared with VSYS monitor, so only when there isn’t an SPI transaction in progress can VSYS be read via the ADC.
• The Infineon CYW43439 SPI DIN/DOUT and IRQ all share one pin on the RP2040. Only when an SPI transaction isn’t in progress is it suitable to check for IRQs.
• The interface typically runs at 33MHz.

For best wireless performance, the antenna should be in free space. For instance, putting metal under or close by the antenna can reduce its performance both in terms of gain and bandwidth. Adding grounded metal to the sides of the antenna can improve the antenna’s bandwidth.

The unique dual-core, dual-architecture capability of RP2350 allows users to choose between a pair of industry-standard Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open-hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores. You can use either Arm or RISC-V cores, so this is a great way to dabble in RISC-V development with an affordable board that has lots of peripherals. The M33 has an FPU, and is ‘basically’ 2x as fast as the M0+ of the RP2040 when we speed-tested it.

Not only is the Pico 2 twice as fast, it has twice as much RAM, 520KB compared to 264KB. The Pico also has twice as much FLASH memory, 4MB instead of 2MB, which will make it a much better board for CircuitPython usage where the internal memory is used to store files. There’s also one more PIO blocks (3 blocks with 4 state machines apiece, rather than 2) so you can do even more pin twiddling at once. For folks who want to use the RP2350 to generate high frequency output signals like DVI display output, you can use the HSTX (high speed transmission) peripheral rather than PIO.