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."

A Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, revisited: the Pico W5 features twice the flash memory and a dual-band radio module. (📷: Elecrow)

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.

ghalfacree

Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.

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