The Raspberry Pi Foundation Launches the $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W

[TheLostSwede]

New product alert! In January last year, we launched the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico, our first product built on silicon designed here at Raspberry Pi. At its heart is the RP2040 microcontroller, built on TSMC's 40 nm low-power process, and incorporating two 133 MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores, 264kB of on-chip SRAM, and our unique programmable I/O subsystem. Since launch, we've sold nearly two million Pico boards, and RP2040 has found its way into a huge number of third-party products. We always believed that RP2040 was a great fit for commercial and industrial applications, but the global semiconductor shortage has vastly accelerated adoption. With millions of units on hand today, and pipeline in place for tens of millions more, design engineers who have been let down by their current suppliers have a perfect excuse to experiment.

Fast cores, large memory, and flexible interfacing make RP2040 a natural building block for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. But Pico itself has one obvious missing feature for IoT: a method for connecting to the network. Now, this is about to change. Today, we're launching three new members of the Pico family. Raspberry Pi Pico W is priced at $6, and brings 802.11n wireless networking to the Pico platform, while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling. Pico H ($5) and Pico WH ($7) add pre-populated headers, and our new 3-pin debug connector, to Pico and Pico W respectively. Pico H and Pico W are available today; Pico WH will follow in August.




We've worked with our friends at Infineon to add their CYW43439 wireless chip to Pico W. Like all modern Raspberry Pi boards, the radio circuitry is encapsulated in a metal shield can, reducing compliance costs for customers who want to integrate it into their own products.

Eagle-eyed readers of datasheets will notice that CYW43439 supports both Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low-Energy: we have not enabled Bluetooth on Pico W at launch, but may do so in the future.

Software and documentation
For C developers, today's release of the Pico SDK includes wireless networking support. The network stack is built around lwIP, and uses libcyw43 from Damien George (of MicroPython fame) to communicate with the wireless chip. By default, libcyw43 is licensed for non-commercial use, but Pico W users, and anyone else who builds their product around RP2040 and CYW43439, benefit from a free commercial-use license. MicroPython users can download an updated UF2 image with networking support for Pico W.

This UF2 firmware we're making available for Pico W is a separate build to the existing MicroPython firmware for our original Pico board. We'll be upstreaming the changes to the main MicroPython repository soon after launch, but as MicroPython has separate binaries on a per-board rather than per-architecture basis there will always be two distinct UF2 firmware releases going forward. One for Pico, the other for Pico W. Getting started guides for C and MicroPython, as well as links to API level documentation, to get you online are available in the microcontrollers section of our documentation site. Over the next month or two we'll be rolling out more demos and documentation to help you get the most out of your Pico W.

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[Frick]

Oohh maybe an Rpi one can actually buy at sane prices.

 

[natr0n]

I just stared to play around with rpi4 again. Lakka is awesome for emulators. Its an OS that boots retroarch.

I love these things

 

[Space Lynx]

@TheLostSwede where in the world is there a TSMC 40nm factory? and if it does exist, why is not producing chips for things that have shortage in chips like cars? I have never understood the allocation of the supply chain on old tech like this.

Not saying the world doesn't want $6 Raspberry Pi's, just saying if that production time at a ancient factory like this could be used to ease the shortage crises, why would it not be done? Would mean more profit, I'm pretty sure the car industry would be willing to pay a lot more for any node available to them than what Raspberry Pi can offer.

 

[ncrs]

@TheLostSwede where in the world is there a TSMC 40nm factory? and if it does exist, why is not producing chips for things that have shortage in chips like cars? I have never understood the allocation of the supply chain on old tech like this.

Old processes don't disappear when new ones are introduced. Do you think old fabs simply get closed when the bleeding edge moves on? If you take a look at the Wikipedia list you'll see that some fabs are multi-process.

Not saying the world doesn't want $6 Raspberry Pi's, just saying if that production time at a ancient factory like this could be used to ease the shortage crises, why would it not be done? Would mean more profit, I'm pretty sure the car industry would be willing to pay a lot more for any node available to them than what Raspberry Pi can offer.

Unfortunately it's not that simple. Once you design a part in a particular process you can't simply take it elsewhere to manufacture without expensive redesigns. Just ask Intel how much porting Rocket Lake back to 14nm cost, and that was with their own foundry.
Different process lines at a foundry can't be scaled easily. For example if there's a shortage of a particular 28nm TSMC part then you can't really do much. The line allocation is sold way before manufacturing takes place. You can't take it to another process line without a redesign nor can you take it to another foundry.
The particular problem of car electronics is exacerbated by the rigorous certifications involved. They can't switch parts easily because they would have to go through the certification process again. This all costs both money and time.
The shortage problem is multi-faceted and not exactly the fault of foundries.

 

[Steevo]

@TheLostSwede where in the world is there a TSMC 40nm factory? and if it does exist, why is not producing chips for things that have shortage in chips like cars? I have never understood the allocation of the supply chain on old tech like this.

Not saying the world doesn't want $6 Raspberry Pi's, just saying if that production time at a ancient factory like this could be used to ease the shortage crises, why would it not be done? Would mean more profit, I'm pretty sure the car industry would be willing to pay a lot more for any node available to them than what Raspberry Pi can offer.

They just don't throw away their old nodes, they use them for things like this. Also, the 40nm node may be unsuitable for the extreme temps experianced in automotive or industrial applications -40-300F

 

[trsttte]

The particular problem of car electronics is exacerbated by the rigorous certifications involved.

Not to mention of course the particular problem on cars was self caused by oems/suppliers cancelling all orders at the start of the pandemic, all available capacity getting snatched up by consumer electronics, and automotive oems/suppliers wanting supply to magically re-appear on a whim because they grossly overestimated the demand decrease and don't know how their just in time supply chain works (semiconductors have a long lead time).

They just don't throw away their old nodes, they use them for things like this. Also, the 40nm node may be unsuitable for the extreme temps experianced in automotive or industrial applications -40-300F

It also doesn't make sense to use (and pay) for leading edge nodes to produce simpler microcontrollers or socs for example

 

[Space Lynx]

Not to mention of course the particular problem on cars was self caused by oems/suppliers cancelling all orders at the start of the pandemic, all available capacity getting snatched up by consumer electronics, and automotive oems/suppliers wanting supply to magically re-appear on a whim because they grossly overestimated the demand decrease and don't know how their just in time supply chain works (semiconductors have a long lead time).



It also doesn't make sense to use (and pay) for leading edge nodes to produce simpler microcontrollers or socs for example

thanks for the responses

seems to me the real cause of the problem is the short sighted CEO's who make the big decisions, cause they live and breathe in the short term profits, and never think ahead... a common problem, even before covid existed.

 

[SpittinFax]

Raspberry Pi's are getting so small that you could legitimately lose them by sneezing on your desk. The smallest one I've used was the Raspberry Pi Zero W with the add-on GPIO header pins, and even that thing was tiny. That one was 66x30mm, this new one is 53x21mm. Really great news for the prototyping industry.

 

[AusWolf]

Two cores, 133 MHz... what year is it again?

 

[Easy Rhino]

...andddddd it's gone.

 

[Blue4130]

Two cores, 133 MHz... what year is it again?

For the applications that these are aimed at, that's plenty.

 

[TheLostSwede]

@TheLostSwede where in the world is there a TSMC 40nm factory? and if it does exist, why is not producing chips for things that have shortage in chips like cars? I have never understood the allocation of the supply chain on old tech like this.

Not saying the world doesn't want $6 Raspberry Pi's, just saying if that production time at a ancient factory like this could be used to ease the shortage crises, why would it not be done? Would mean more profit, I'm pretty sure the car industry would be willing to pay a lot more for any node available to them than what Raspberry Pi can offer.

This should help answer your question.

TSMC to Customers: It's Time to Stop Using Older Nodes and Move to 28nm

www.anandtech.com

 

[Wirko]

thanks for the responses

seems to me the real cause of the problem is the short sighted CEO's who make the big decisions, cause they live and breathe in the short term profits, and never think ahead... a common problem, even before covid existed.

Then again, why should they be anything else than shortsighted when many short term profits add up to this:

Similar for other largest car makers (and a little worse for Toyota). Now try to buy a car in 2022.

 

[Space Lynx]

Then again, why should they be anything else than shortsighted when many short term profits add up to this:

Because some day it all comes crashing down, and crashing down harder than anything the world has ever seen before.

Needs to be more long term thinking in a lot of the ways our species makes decisions, because eventually there won't be short term profits, even for the 1%.

 

[Zareek]

Then again, why should they be anything else than shortsighted when many short term profits add up to this:
View attachment 253166
Similar for other largest car makers (and a little worse for Toyota). Now try to buy a car in 2022.

Because there are far more important things in this world than making money. We've turned businesses into profit driven maniacs, without morals or common sense. They have no reason to obey laws because the penalties for breaking those laws rarely ever result in the decision makers paying any real consequences. "Oh dear, a million dollar fine." but behind closed doors it's "Ha, a million dollar fine, please we made 10 times that breaking the rule in the first place!"

 

[Frick]

Because there are far more important things in this world than making money.

The thing is the people handling the money doesn't believe this. My brother knows big finance guy who while his son was in the hospital literally dying held a meeting with his employees stating with hand on heart that "the only thing that matters is money", and he meant it.

 

[Zareek]

The thing is the people handling the money doesn't believe this. My brother knows big finance guy who while his son was in the hospital literally dying held a meeting with his employees stating with hand on heart that "the only thing that matters is money", and he meant it.

What a dirt bag!

 

[Frick]

What a dirt bag!

Sure. And people like him is in charge.

 

[Greenslade]

What do you guys think of this

The number one PI Lee https://www.crowpi.cc/products/crowpi-l I like the look of it but far too expensive

 

[SpittinFax]

Two cores, 133 MHz... what year is it again?

I know right.....we should have a minimum of 8 cores at 5GHz and at least 32GB of RAM. That technology should've trickled down to $6 devices by now.

 

[Greenslade]

I keep on getting a message on my PI saying* Low on battery power*?
The Pi is powered by the mains, with the official Pi power plug.

 

[W1zzard]

I keep on getting a message on my PI saying* Low on battery power*?
The Pi is powered by the mains, with the official Pi power plug.

Your USB cable might be too long/bad quality. The voltage warning appears at a certain voltage level, check with a DMM

 

[Greenslade]

Your USB cable might be too long/bad quality. The voltage warning appears at a certain voltage level, check with a DMM

Thanks for that.

Thanks for that. Another problem i put Twister OS on an external drive,one of the adapters worked to get it on a SSD ,but when i tried it to loaf the system it could not do it.I also tried a sabrant caddy that did flicker but also failed to boot up . I will have to get Lee the PI mans recomendations .

UGREEN USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter, 2.5 Hard Drive Reader HDD SSD, Plug and Play 2.5 SATA to USB

 

[trsttte]

Thanks for that.

The raspberry pi wasn't made to power external devices that demand any resonable amount of power. To use hdd's or ssd's you need to get an adapter that uses external power