Also known as: Pico, Pico W
The Raspberry Pi Pico is a tiny, low-cost microcontroller board built around the RP2040 chip.1
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.
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.
Sources
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Raspberry Pi Pico — Wikipedia, on the Pico board and its variants. ↩