New Pico W

I’m still just using the old 8266 WeMos d1 mini boards for my sensors, and they’re surprisingly reliable at super low prices. No BLE on those though. I did get some esp32 boards to experiment with over the winter, but renovations and other physical labour projects kept me too busy. I’m hoping the BLE allows for a nicer wifi provisioning experience.

 Please don’t get me wrong though - I can sound (very ) negative when it’s really just my musings out loud. I’m excited to see this new affordable  wifi dev board option from the Pi foundation - I expect some new-product issues but I have faith that they’ll ultimately have a sweet little easy to program wifi board at easy to afford pricing.

I should add that the current existing Pi Pico is already pretty amazing. The size, power, and price, as well as the easy python programming, makes it a much nicer option for my projects than the very limited digispark and pro-mini type boards at similar costs. I’m not sure how the Pico compares for power use, but I’m only using plug-in usb powered projects at the moment.

ooooh. One more module to place on the to-do list. I was planning a project on the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, but this is going to win on price.

shabaz said:

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.

That would be a good explanation why you haven't had problems then :) it'd make sense that the configuration the people I've known use it may have some questionable issue with the boards they've had, I don't have a link to hand else I'd share it.

Super Cool! It appears you still get all the same IO pins plus wifi. So it should be very easy to swap between a pico and a picoW. And thus only splurge on the extra $2 when you really need it.

I hope they actually implement some of the low power DTIM wifi modes, I haven't had much luck getting those to work on an ESP.

Not the same footprint, but it is a nice board.

Wiznet has RP2040 boards for both ethernet and WiFi: https://eshop.wiznet.io/?ckattempt=1

The ethernet version is $10 and the WiFi $7.  They have GitHub libraries for CircuitPython and Arduino.  It looks like they have more Flash memory than the Raspberry Pi offering and are in stock.  I've used Wiznet ethernet successfully with the MSP430.

That’s really cool! So many great options seem to be popping up built on the Pi Pico.

The WizFi version is also pin compatible with the Pi Pico, so it has the swapping option too as scottiebabe pointed out earlier for the PicoW.

You make a really good and interesting point about the pin compatibility! That never occurred to me, but that does open up a lot of extra convenience.

Good prices, but no BLE.