Field Guide · hardware

Also known as: Pico, Pico W

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, low-cost microcontroller board built around the RP2040 chip.1

micro-USB (power + flashing) RP2040 dual Cortex-M0+ GPIO edge GPIO edge castellated pads: solder as a header or reflow like a module
The Pico's layout: a micro-USB port for power and drag-and-drop programming, the RP2040 in the middle, and castellated pads down both edges — most of them GPIO that double as serial, PWM, and ADC lines. The castellations let you solder headers or reflow the whole board onto another PCB like a module.

Overview

Unlike the Linux-running Raspberry Pi single-board computers, the Pico is a bare-metal MCU board: castellated edges for soldering, a row of GPIO pins, and a USB port that doubles as power and a drag-and-drop programming interface. It is written in C/C++ with the Pico SDK or in MicroPython.

The Pico W adds Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth), turning it into a cheap connected node for the Internet of Things; the Pico 2 and 2 W move to the newer RP2350 chip with faster cores and more memory.

The Pico lineup

Several variants share the same board footprint:

Board Chip Wireless Note
Pico RP2040 — The original
Pico W RP2040 Wi-Fi + BLE Connected projects
Pico 2 RP2350 — Faster, more RAM
Pico 2 W RP2350 Wi-Fi + BLE Newest connected board

Where it fits

The Pico is a common first board for learning embedded programming, competing with Arduino and ESP32 boards. It is well suited to reading sensors, driving displays, and bit-banging protocols via the RP2040’s programmable I/O. Like any MCU it is far too small to run GopherTrunk, but it is exactly the sort of device that crowds the airwaves GopherTrunk listens to — and its PIO blocks make it a capable GPIO/timing helper alongside a capture node.

Sources

  1. Raspberry Pi Pico — Wikipedia, on the Pico board and its variants. ↩

See also

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