Quick Review of the Raspberry Pi Pico W
While the Pico W was announced months ago, only now it is available in Brazil. This is a quick review of what it brings.
A Pi Cow (photo by @RaspberryPi) |
Visually the Pico W distinguishes itself from the plain Pico by having a metal encasing over the new part of the circuit, the antenna and a new placement for the debugging (SWD) pins.
The photo bellow (from @arturo182) shows what is bellow the metal case:
The technical documentation informs that the WiFi is implemented by an Infinion CYW43439 chip. Its datasheet and the Pico W schematic allow us to see that:
- It supports the b/g/n modes of the 802.11 standard, in the 2.4GHz band
- The connection of the CYW43439 to the RP2040 is done through SPI
- The pins used in this connection where not available at the Pi Pico connector (suggesting that they were reserved for the W model)
- The on-board LED is connected to the CYW43439 chip, as GPIO25 (used in the old Pico) is now connected to the CYW43439. This makes using the LED more complicated (specially when programming in C)
- While the CYW43439 has support for Bluetooth 5.2, the pins normally used for it are not connected in the Pico W. To implement Bluetooth it will have to be commanded over SPI, I think this will require a new firmware for the CYW43439 (it has a ARM Cortex M3 inside), but there is no official word on it.
Besides these differences, the Pico W is just like the Pico. This includes the absence of a Reset button and a 2 Mbyte Flash (this can be a problem to some applications as the TCP/IP code takes a lot of space).
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