The Raspberry Pi Project has unveiled the new Raspberry Pi Pico W board, continuing the development of the miniature Pico board, equipped with a proprietary RP2040 microcontroller. The new edition is distinguished by the integration of Wi-Fi support (2.4GHz 802.11n), implemented on the basis of the Infineon CYW43439 chip. The CYW43439 chip also supports Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low-Energy, but they are not included in the board yet. The cost of the new board is $6, which is two dollars more than the first option. Of the areas of application, in addition to sharing with Raspberry Pi computers, developing embedded systems and control systems for various devices, the Wi-Fi option is positioned as a platform for creating Internet of Things (Internet of Things) devices that interact over a network.
The RP2040 chip includes a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ (133MHz) processor with 264 KB of on-board RAM (SRAM), a DMA controller, a temperature sensor, a timer, and a USB 1.1 controller. The board contains 2 MB of Flash memory, but the chip supports expansion up to 16 MB. For I / O, GPIO ports are provided (30 pins, of which 4 are allocated for analog input), UART, I2C, SPI, USB (client and host with support for booting from drives in UF2 format) and specialized 8 pins PIO (Programmable I / O state machines) to connect your own peripherals. Power can be supplied in the range from 1.8 to 5.5 volts, which allows you to use a variety of power sources, including two or three conventional AA batteries or standard lithium-ion batteries.
Applications can be created using C, C++, or MicroPython. The MicroPython port for Raspberry Pi Pico was prepared jointly with the author of the project and supports all the features of the chip, including its own interface for connecting PIO extensions. For development for the RP2040 chip using MicroPython, the Thonny integrated programming environment has been adapted. The capabilities of the chip are enough to run applications for solving machine learning problems, for the development of which a port of the TensorFlow Lite framework has been prepared. For network access, it is proposed to use the lwIP network stack, which is included in the new version of the Pico SDK for developing applications in the C language, as well as in the new firmware with MicroPython.
Source: opennet.ru