I'm going to avoid RPI products where I can for right now. All the issues with availability have turned me off on them. Their attempts to get compute modules to businesses using them for products seems to have failed (or at least I have heard nothing from them). And this part in particular seems under specced compared to the competition.
Yeah, the RP2040 has done quite well throughout the chip shortage. That's probably because it's too new to have commercial users (have you ever bought a product at a store that had a RP2040 in it?), but somewhat appreciated in a world where my go-to STM32 chips have an indefinite lead time.
As I understand, they are having much more trouble sourcing components for their Linux ARM machines than for their microcontroller hardware. Hence why they are launching so many Pico things this year - that's what they can get and sell.
What's interesting with the ESP32 is that the Wifi stack on it consumes a huge amount of both memory and CPU... and it's faster and has more memory than the Pi Pico.
So either they managed to make that more efficient somehow or you'll have exactly jack shit left after turning on wifi on it. Still, the ESP32 is not exactly cheap, but I have a feeling this $7 cost is the usual fantasy they advertise, then sell them for twice the price everywhere.
> but I have a feeling this $7 cost is the usual fantasy they advertise, then sell them for twice the price everywhere.
The current pico is sold at the stated price + taxes here in Sweden, so I don't see why the W wouldn't also be. And it seems unlike that Sweden would be special in that regard.
The RP2040 is just over a dollar and there is nothing else of value on Pico so $4 retail is a bit low (typically you have 3-4x bill of material) but doable.
OTOH Zero is $5 only because it's effectively subsidized at various points in retail chain.
> So either they managed to make that more efficient somehow or you'll have exactly jack shit left after turning on wifi on it.
The wifi stack doesn't run on the rp2040, the cypress module has its own cpus(2!) and ram to handle it. The lwIP stack runs on the pico but its resources requirements are essentially negligible.
So the rp2040 cores and memory are fully available unless you need TLS, which I'm sure will Absolutely steal both resources.
It has more to do with the RPI people not communicating about their supply issues effectively and not being effective in working with customers to plan for them.
While that doesn't currently affect the Pico, maybe it will in the future. So its probably just better to sidestep the whole thing and not use their products.
