Support for Bluetooth in the Pico W Has Arrived (and more)

When the Raspberry Pi Pico W was launched (seven months ago), a somewhat surprise was that the hardware supported Bluetooth but the software did not. All that was said then was that it maybe added in the future. At the beginning of this year, BT support was included in the plans for version 1.5 of the C/C++ SDK, expected for the end of January. It took a few days more, but the new SDK version was released and yes, it includes support for Bluetooth in the Pico W, but it is labeled as BETA. It also includes other important fixes and enhancements.

Bluetooth support is through the BTstack open source library. One concern is that this library is free only for non-commercial applications, it is expect that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will cut some kind of deal with the developers to allow unrestricted use with the Pico W. BTstack is a very comprehensive implementation of the Bluetooth protocols with support for BLE and many BT profiles. Specific documentation for the Pico W is not available right now but there are quite a few examples available.

It is expected that MicroPython and CircuitPython will add Bluetooth support soon. Also expected are projects from the community.

But the new version is not only about Bluetooth support. The full list of changes can be seem at github, here are some highlights:

• numerous bugfixes
• many small enhancements to the existing libraries with the addition of new functions
• upgrade of tinyusb from version 0.12.0 to 0.15.0. This can break some existing code, but promises great improvements in host mode
• addition of a library (pico_i2c_slave) for implementing I2C slaves
• addition of TLS support (pico_mbedtls library)
• addition of the pico_rand library for generating "largely unpredictable random numbers" for better crypto applications

If you are developing for the RP2040 in C or C++, you should start looking right now into this version. If you are using tinyusb you may have to make some changes in your code.

This also means that a will have to revise my book on the RP2040 (now also available on Amazon).