Raspberry Pi's Pico series gets its first model to support wireless networking, with the new Pico W.
Raspberry Pi Pico W (Wireless with WiFi): Overview, Features and Specifications
Pico boards have been around for about a year and a half, serving as Raspberry Pi’s flagship minicomputer board (and have sold nearly two million units since its release). But there was one thing missing from the Pico line: networking. The new Pico W solves that problem.
According to Raspberry Pi, the Pico W builds on its RP2040 microcontroller, while using two 133MHz cores and 256kB of SRAM. It also retains the same level of pin compatibility as the original Pico, so it'll plug into everything the same way. The big difference, of course, is the addition of a way to connect to a network wirelessly.
That functionality comes from Infineon’s CYW43439 wireless chip, which brings 802.11n wireless networking capabilities with a theoretical maximum speed of 300 Mbps. The chip also supports Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low-Energy, but Raspberry Pi says that feature isn’t available in the Pico W. At least not yet, though the company does say that it may enable Bluetooth on the Pico W in the future.
