Comparison of several Pico W's

Overview

Over the past serveral month there has been a surge in adding WiFi support to the Pico 2. Here are several vendors being examined in the article.

• Elecrow RP3250 Pico W5 Board
• Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 w
• Raspberry Pi Pico 2 w

Board description

USB Connector

Raspberry PI PICO 2W chose to use a Micro-B connector while the other two board selected the USB-C connector

External RAM

The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2W has additional 16MB of external RAM connected to the Quad SPI interface, same as the external Flash via a different select line.

SWD Header

The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2W chose to use a Qw/ST connector. Need a to have a break out cable to convert the Qw/ST to pins to connect to a debugger.

WIFI Chip

Electrow Pico W5 board is using a BW16 chip. The BW16 has the WiFi and TCP/UDP stack embedded within the chip. The software interface is described here, Aithinker-Combo

• Elecrow RP3250 Pico W5 Board

External Reset button

The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 w has an external reset pin to simplify reloading code onto the board.

Pin outs