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New Pico W

mp2100

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/

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  • One annoyance with the implementation is that the antenna will be buried in the middle of any enclosure that the Pico W is used in, because the micro USB connector will be on the side of the enclosure most likely, for access to it. That's assuming it's radiation pattern is say doughnut in the plane perpendicular to the Pico's plane along it's longest dimension.

    I guess there was nothing they could do since the shape of the Pico and the USB connector were fixed. It's hard retrofitting an antenna into the design when it wasn't originally designed for it I guess. Had they planned for it, they could have at least suggested in the user documentation of the original Pico, for people not to place a ground plane beneath the Pico at that end. Typical seat of the pants planning : (

  • in reply to shabaz

    It's a fair point, though I wouldn't be too worried about it. It does get complicated for users who like to mount the pico with the castellated pads. I'm sure most designs have a ground fill under the antenna. I assume when mounted with 100 thou headers it works well enough.

  • in reply to scottiebabe

    I think they should have read Dr. Dolittle books, it sums up the problem nicely. I don't know of any product that sticks their antenna buried inside, when it should be facing the exterior of the product, e.g. on an edge.

    image

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