Basically more everything. 2x Cortex M33 cores with floating point, 520KB ram, more PIOs, bunch of secure boot stuff (I have mixed feelings about this), and can boot to a mode with risc-v cores instead of the M33s.
Remember when the Pi Zero, with a full SoC capable of running Linux instead of just a microcontroller, was $5?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
It was marketed as $7 (I think), but it was never sold below $15 as far as I could find.
Also, since that price was without any profit margin, merchants only sold them in expensive bundles most of the time (with a case, SD card, etc).
I have personally bought several $5 Pi Zeros. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve also bought at least a half-dozen Pi Zero Ws for $5 from Microcenter (pre-pandemic), even though their MSRP was $10 at the time. I distinctly remember them being super cheap, but also limited to one per customer (per trip) at that price, so I’d just pop in and grab one any time I was near the Microcenter.
It was $5 but was limited to one per customer (in practice, one per order) at the usual vendors, and became very scarce at the time other pi models did. The wireless version was $10. They later eliminated the non-wireless version, bumped the wireless version to $15, and introduced a new fancier model (Pi Zero 2) that is also $15.
What is the advantage of a Pico 2 compared to the ESP32 variants?
Better marketing. It’s also easier to get a build pipeline for ARM than Xtensa and RISC-V.
I would say the documentation is more thorough, and at least for the non-wireless versions, there are no mysterious code blobs. The source code to everything including the ROM boot loader is online. The Pico boards also have a nice voltage regulation system so you can run them on a wide range of supply voltages.
How long will it stay $5. Taking bets now.
It might just become unobtanium like the pi zero was til they jacked up the price and dropped the no wifi version.
Added: it still has to compete with the ESP32 so maybe there isn’t that much price headroom, and maybe the ESP32 is why they had to refresh the Pico in the first place.
bunch of secure boot stuff (I have mixed feelings about this)
Idk man, it’s an optional feature that you can program yourself. The only catch is you can only program it once.
How is this not considered spam?
This is literally just an ad for a product. It even has the price in the title for crying out loud!
And to top it off, it’s posted by an account that I’m pretty sure reported me for spam, because I posted a tech-philosophy essay where the site mentioned at the end that the essay was also published in a zine.
Lol, and just immediately downvoted. Lemmy needs that essay more than I thought! Too easy to be reactive without accountability on this platform, sadly
The Pico never really took off, honestly. I doubt this thing is going to fly off the shelves or anything.
Idk about took off but it was a successful product by reasonable standards. I have a few of them and chose it for a product that ended up going nowhere. That was partly because of hardware add-ons available for the pico but not for comparable boards. The existence of that 3rd party hardware ecosystem itself shows that the pico did ok.
Can someone fill me in on the intended usecases for something like this? If I wanted to make a personal cloud storage (nextcloud or similar) with a bunch of HDDs for example, would this be ok or underpowered to manage that?
The Pico is a microcontroller board more like an Arduino. it’d be great as the motherboard of a weather station or something.
These aren’t meant for complex things or even to install a full operating system kernel on or for moving data files. These are more for controlling electronics directly. Something you’d find inside a very specialized device like maybe controlling the speed of an air filter fan based on information from a few environmental sensors.
I think it’d be easier to use the normal raspberry pi instead in that case.
I run all of my DIY keyboard builds (here’s the latest) off of Pi Picos or clones with USB-C.
I just posted a link to a review by someone who has been playing with it for a while and talks about a lot of use-cases: https://lemmy.ml/post/18938549
Yes, way too underpowered. This is for controlling your 3D printer or stuff like that.
Meanwhile, Texas Instruments offers an overpriced sbc that is less user friendly and probably loaded with security vulnerabilities since it was designed for IoT applications https://www.ti.com/tool/BEAGL-PLAY-SBC#supported-products
That’s more like an old school raspberry pi (runs Linux etc), not like a Pico. I didn’t know about that specific version but variants of the Beagleboard and Beaglebone have been around forever (longer than the raspberry pi). They are better than the rpi in some ways, and at least some of them are more open, but Rpi knocked the rug out from under them in cost and performance. I wouldn’t be so sure of the security of the wireless Pico either.
