Elecrow Launches the Pico W5, a Dual-Band Alternative to the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W
Same RP2350 microcontroller, same pinout, same footprint — but a dual-band Wi-Fi radio, dedicated reset button, and USB Type-C port.
Hobbyist electronics specialist Elecrow has launched an in-house alternative to the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, dubbed the Pico W5 — featuring the same layout and Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller but with USB Type-C, twice the flash, and an upgraded dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 radio module on-board.
"Pico W5 is an advanced microcontroller based on the Raspberry Pi Pico W design, designed to provide developers with more powerful functions and a wider range of applications," the company says of its creation. "It inherits the core features of the Raspberry Pi Pico, such as the official self-designed RP2350 microcontroller chip, up to 150MHz ARM Cortex [M33] dual-core processor, and 26 multi-function GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] pins. At the same time, it has been significantly enhanced in terms of USB interface, Flash capacity and Bluetooth protocol performance."
The new Pico W5, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is the second in the family to come from Elecrow, after the company launched a similar board built around the last-generation Raspberry Pi RP2040. The move to the new RP2350 brings faster Arm Cortex-M33 cores plus the choice to use free and open-source 32-bit Hazard3 RISC-V cores in their place — along with a near-doubling of memory to 520kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM).
Like the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, the Pico W5 includes an integrated radio module — but unlike Raspberry Pi's official board, it's dual-band and connects to both 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n networks. The module, a B&T BW16, also includes Bluetooth 5.0 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) support, matching the feature set of Raspberry Pi's equivalent. Everything is installed on a board, meanwhile, which matches the pinout and footprint of Raspberry Pi's Pico 2 W — though swaps the divisive micro-USB connector for a more modern USB Type-C port and adds a dedicated reset button, while the on-board flash has been doubled to 8MB.
The Pico W5 is now available to order on the Elecrow store at $6.90.