“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.”
“As expected. Very happy with the purchase. Tested all the functions. No issues whatsoever. Very small board that fits well in any project. Dispatched quickly and received within a few days.”
“The Raspberry Pi universe keeps getting larger and better, and with the PicoW it adds connectivity to a very useful small platform. And the PiHut got one to me quickly. Not to mention great resources for putting it to use.”
