Raspberry Pi Pico W

Raspberry Pi Pico W has been designed to be a low cost yet flexible development platform for RP2040, with a 2.4GHz wireless interface. It provides a minimal yet flexible external circuitry to support the RP2040 chip: flash memory (Winbond W25Q16JV), a crystal, power supplies and decoupling, and USB connector. The majority of the RP2040 microcontroller pins are brought to the user IO pins on the left and right edge of the board. Four RP2040 I/O are used for internal functions: driving an LED, on-board switch mode power supply (SMPS) power control, and sensing the system voltages.

Specifications:

• RP2040 microcontroller with 2MB of flash memory
• On-board single-band 2.4GHz wireless interfaces (802.11n)
• Micro USB B port for power and data (and for reprogramming the flash)
• 40 pin 21mmx51mm 'DIP' style 1mm thick PCB with 0.1" through-hole pins also with edge castellations
• Exposes 26 multi-function 3.3V general purpose I/O (GPIO)
• 23 GPIO are digital-only, with three also being ADC capable
• Can be surface mounted as a module
• 3-pin ARM serial wire debug (SWD) port
• Simple yet highly flexible power supply architecture
• Various options for easily powering the unit from micro USB, external supplies or batteries
• High quality, low cost, high availability
• Comprehensive SDK, software examples and documentation

For full details of the RP2040 microcontroller please see the RP2040 Datasheet.

Key features include:

• Dual-core cortex M0+ at up to 133MHz
• On-chip PLL allows variable core frequency
• 264kByte multi-bank high performance SRAM
• External Quad-SPI Flash with eXecute In Place (XIP) and 16kByte on-chip cache
• High performance full-crossbar bus fabric
• On-board USB1.1 (device or host)
• 30 multi-function general purpose I/O (four can be used for ADC)
• 1.8-3.3V I/O voltage
• 12-bit 500ksps analogue to digital converter (ADC)
• Various digital peripherals
• 2 × UART, 2 × I2C, 2 × SPI, 16 × PWM channels
• 1 × timer with 4 alarms, 1 × real time clock
• 2 × programmable I/O (PIO) blocks, 8 state machines in total
• Flexible, user-programmable high-speed I/O
• Can emulate interfaces such as SD card and VGA

NOTE! Raspberry Pi Pico W I/O voltage is fixed at 3.3V


Pico W has an on-board 2.4GHz wireless interface using an Infineon CYW43439. The antenna is an onboard antenna licensed from ABRACON (formerly ProAnt). The wireless interface is connected via SPI to the RP2040. Pico W has been designed to use either soldered 0.1-inch pin-headers (it is one 0.1-inch pitch wider than a standard 40-pin DIP package), or to be positioned as a surface mountable 'module', as the user I/O pins are also castellated. There are SMT pads underneath the USB connector and BOOTSEL button, which allow these signals to be accessed if used as a reflow-soldered SMT module.

Raspberry Pi Pico W uses an on-board buck-boost SMPS which is able to generate the required 3.3V (to power RP2040 and external circuitry) from a wide range of input voltages (~1.8 to 5.5V). This allows significant flexibility in powering the unit from various sources, such as a single lithium-ion cell, or three AA cells in series. Battery chargers can also be
very easily integrated with the Pico W powerchain. Reprogramming the Pico W flash can be done using USB (simply drag and drop a file onto the Pico W, which appears as
a mass storage device), or the standard serial wire debug (SWD) port can reset the system and load and run code without any button presses. The SWD port can also be used to interactively debug code running on the RP2040.