Last year, Raspberry Pi released a new $6 embedded board with wireless connectivity, the Raspberry Pi Pico W. The board has now been updated to support Bluetooth, and you don’t even need to buy a new Pico W or add-on board.
The Raspberry Pi Pico W is intended for use with embedded devices and related DIY projects — it’s not a full micro PC with a desktop operating system, like the regular Pi boards. The Pico W uses a Infineon CYW43439 chip for wireless connectivity, which includes both 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5.2, but only the Wi-Fi hardware was accessible to software at launch.
Raspberry Pi said in a blog post today, “Now, with the release of version 1.5.1 of the C SDK, and the latest MicroPython build, your existing Pico W has gained the ability to communicate with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE devices. Specifically, we support Bluetooth Classic — with the temporary exception of ACL/SCO — along with both the BLE Central and Peripheral roles. Things are also configurable so you can enable Bluetooth Classic and BLE either individually, or have both of them available at the same time.”
Raspberry Pi said routing both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth traffic over the Pi W’s single three-pin SPI bus was “a substantial engineering challenge.” Now that the work is done, though, the Raspberry Pi Pico W is an even better board for embedded projects — especially since it still costs just $6 (for the version without pre-soldered headers).
Meanwhile, if you are more interested in the main Raspberry Pi boards, the company is ramping up production to finally meet demand.
Source: Raspberry Pi
