“A very dinky piece of kit. Very versatile with an impressive range of features. Easy to setup and program. Not sure yet what I'm going to use it for but it will definitely come in handy.”
“I teach an embedded systems course, and permanently try to find an affordable ARM system, which is convenient for students, well documented and easy to purchase. Raspberry Pi Pico W fully satisfies all the mentioned, especially because it adds simple wireless connectivity to the original version. This connectivity opens plenty of possibilities for projects, which are very interesting (but still comprehensible) for students.”
“The Pico-W was available immediately from Pi-Hut at a good price and with reasonable shipping costs (given that I'm on the other side of the planet). Dispatch (and notification) was prompt.
The Pico-W is a very nice little board and quite different from the Espressif series (ESP8266/ESP32).
Most of the available examples on the web are MicroPython based, so if you're looking for C/C++ examples and toolkit, I'd recommend cloning Earl F. Philhower's Arduino core from:-
https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico
...and using the pico-SDK from that package along with CMake to build your first programs. An excellent example is Lurk101's "pshell" from:-
https://github.com/lurk101/pshell
...which will give you a C-compiler and a shell-like environment (and filesystem) to experiment with your pico over the USB connection using a terminal program (minicom/screen).
Loading your compiled program onto the Pico-W is as simple as copying the "xxxx.uf2" file from your build directory to the /media/YOUR_USERNAME/RPI-RP2 directory.”
