New Pico W

I guess I should have guessed what all that empty space on the original Raspberry Pi Pico board was for. They put a WiFi 802.11N chip there. CYW43439 from Infineon. This will be a nice board for IoT. And it's cheap. $6.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-w-your-6-iot-platform/

cstanton over 3 years ago

£10 with shipping from pi hut and pimoroni, meh.
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shabaz over 3 years ago

I'm going to wait until it's a bit more mature : ) Just historically it takes Pi org a while to sort things out. I couldn't see in the user docs how the credentials are secured (I hope they get sent into the Infineon chip and stored there).
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ntewinkel over 3 years ago

This is interesting - a challenger to the ESP line.
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ntewinkel over 3 years ago in reply to shabaz

It looks like this first round is their "mvp" "minimal" get it out the door option. In the write up they state: "we have not enabled Bluetooth on Pico W at launch, but may do so in the future." So there's some work still left to do. To fully compete with the ESP32 lineup they will need to get all of that functionality running, but Espressive has quite the head start, so I'm with you on the wait and see bit. I'd be up for a round of experimentation though if e14 sends out samples :)
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shabaz over 3 years ago in reply to ntewinkel

Agree, ESP32 is exceptionally good, with excellent C libraries for functionality, and super-mature. I've not tried MicroPython on ESP32 so I don't know what that's like. I hope the Pico network library is stable and becomes feature-rich soon.. and BLE is very important too!
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ntewinkel over 3 years ago in reply to cstanton

cstanton said:
£10 with shipping

reminds me of that $5 Raspberry Pi Zero that was never available for $5.
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ntewinkel over 3 years ago in reply to cstanton

I just received an email from Seeed Studios with their own version (using an ESP chip for WiFi), also at $10, and also out of stock :D

www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-RP2040-mini-Dev-Board-p-4933.html
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cstanton over 3 years ago in reply to shabaz

Have you ever had serial clock or power issues with ESP32? Almost every person I've known work with it has had issues with the 3v3 power on their dev boards.
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shabaz over 3 years ago in reply to cstanton

I haven't seen any issue so far, but I don't have a dev board, I've soldered the ESP32 module onto a breakout board, and then wired that to the 3.3V supply.

For the supply, I've used a single cell LiPo, and then wired that to a LTC3534 chip, which is a buck-boost to 3.3V, at up to 500 mA (the ESP32 may need about ~260 mA peak for WiFi, from memory - I may have got that wrong). That worked well.

However, the LTC3534 is expensive, so for a homemade dev-board PCB layout that I was working on, I decided to use TPS63031 instead, it was a lot cheaper, however now it has a 2-year lead-time : ( Since then, I've considered replacing it with MP2171GJ-Z which is a buck converter so not as good, but at least it's available, and low-cost.
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shabaz over 3 years ago in reply to cstanton

Just peeked at the Pico-W datasheet, they are using a RT6154 buck-boost (PDF datasheet), which looks good, but zero stock everywhere.
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