In a nutshell: The new Raspberry Pi Pico W adds built-in Wi-Fi connectivity to the company's popular Pico board launched last year. These wireless-enabled boards will be a great fit for many third-party products, such as IoT devices. Meanwhile, the Pico H and Pico WH add pre-populated headers and a 3-pin debug connector.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced three new variants of its tiny Pico board. The Raspberry Pi Pico W adds built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, while the Pico H and Pico WH are versions with pre-installed header pins and a three-pin debug connector.
The original Raspberry Pi Pico launched early last year for just $4. It comes with an RP2040 chip built on TSMC's 40nm process and features two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133 MHz and 264KB of on-chip RAM. The board also has 2 MB of flash memory and a micro USB 1.1 port.
As previously mentioned, the new Pico W gets Wi-Fi capabilities through an Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip with an onboard antenna. It's a 1x1 SISO solution with support for the 2.4 GHz-only Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) protocol and 20 MHz-wide channels, allowing for a PHY data rate up to 96 Mbps. Interestingly, this chipset also features built-in Bluetooth 5.2 support, but the company hasn't enabled it on the Pico W at launch.
These new Wi-Fi versions will likely be very popular for IoT applications, with the company claiming it sold nearly 2 million units of the standard Pico board in the past 18 months.
The Pico H and Pico W are already available for $5 and $6, respectively, while the Pico WH will launch next month for $7.
https://www.techspot.com/news/95155-raspberry-pi-launches-wi-fi-equipped-pico-w.html
