Raspberry Pi Pico W: Bluetooth 5.2 support available for RP2040 microcontroller board

Almost a year has passed since the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the Pico W, a developer board that debuted alongside the Pico H and Pico WH. As we discussed at the time, the Pico W relied on the RP2040, a microcontroller that arrived roughly a year earlier. For reference, the RP2040 has two ARM Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133 MHz and 264 KB of RAM but supports only USB 1.1, hence the use of a Micro USB port in the Pico W.

Additionally, the Pico W packs an Infineon CYW43439 via SPI, which enables the board to connect to 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi networks and provides support for 802.11 n Wi-Fi. The Infineon CYW43439 is also Bluetooth capable, although the Raspberry Pi Foundation did not include host-side software or firmware support for Bluetooth at launch. The latest MicroPython build changes this, as does version 1.5.1 of the C SDK.

According to Pi Foundation CEO Eben Upton, Bluetooth support has now been merged upstream into the official MicroPython repo, bringing additional to the Pico W. Please note that the Pico W integrates Bluetooth Classic, temporarily excluding ACL and SCO, plus Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Central and Peripheral. Please see the Pi Foundation's blog post for more details.

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