There is a new Raspberry Pi in town: the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W. It’s a wireless version of the original Pico 2, now equipped with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2 support.
The Upgraded Pico 2 W Brings Wi-Fi to Your Home Projects
When it first launched in August 2024, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was a significant improvement over the original Pico. With a higher clock speed (150MHz), double the onboard SRAM (520KB) and flash memory (4MB), and more powerful Arm processor cores, the Pico 2 was an immediate hit.
However, some users felt that despite these improvements, two features were missing: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.
Now, the new Pico 2 W brings 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2 support to the popular microcontroller, allowing you to bring much better wireless support to any project. However, you should note that the Wi-Fi support is limited to the slower 802.11n standard, so you won’t be doing anything involving blazing-fast internet speeds.
Instead, the additional of these wireless standards means you can easily integrate the Pico 2 W into existing smart home and other wireless networks, and you could see about upgradng some of your older Raspberry Pi Pico projects.
Can You Game on a Pico 2 W?
The Raspberry Pi 2 W is a microcontroller, not a microprocessor. That means it wasn’t designed for gaming.
That said, there are always some amazing folks that want to bring gaming to any bit of hardware, and we’ve previously seen the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 running Doom via the RP2040 Doom project—at a smooth 50FPS, no less.
The helpful team over at PiCockpit has also compiled a list of games that run on the original Pico, and some of those are likely to function fine on the more powerful Pico 2.
