Raspberry Pi
has introduced a successor to
last year’s Pico, a $4 microcontroller based on the RP2040 chip the company designed itself. The new model is called the Pico W. It’s basically the same hardware, but it adds, as the name suggests, an 802.11n Wi-Fi radio, making it useful for putting together IoT projects and the like. It’s also more expensive than the standard Pico, coming in at $6.
A 50 percent price jump isn’t insignificant (especially if you plan on buying a ton of these), but it’s understandable why the W version costs so much more than the original. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton
told The Verge’s Nilay Patel that adding radios to products is very expensive. “Just the radio conformance for a modern Raspberry Pi product is the best part of half a million dollars,” he said. The $4 Pico also isn’t going away. If cost is a big factor and you can do without network connectivity, you can still get the less expensive model.
www.theverge.com
