When it first launched the Pico W had the hardware to support Bluetooth, but not the sofware. With the very latest SDK update it now supports Bluetooth and the mbedtls crypto library for HTTPS/TLS support.

The new SDK 1.5.0 is now available for download from the Raspberry Pi GitHub page. There are a few minor changes to the existing features and lots of bug fixes, but the two big improvements are the addition of the BTstack library and mbedtls.

The Bluetooth modes that are available are:

• pico_btstack_ble - Adds Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) support.

• pico_btstack_classic - Adds Bluetooth Classic support.

• pico_btstack_sbc_encoder - Adds Bluetooth Sub Band Coding (SBC) encoder support.

• pico_btstack_sbc_decoder - Adds Bluetooth Sub Band Coding (SBC) decoder support.

• pico_btstack_bnep_lwip - Adds Bluetooth Network Encapsulation Protocol (BNEP) support using LwIP.

There is also an option to use FreeRTOS. So far there isn't much Pico-specific documentation, but there are examples and the BTstack website has enough general information to get you started. At the moment the addition is listed as being in beta, but given this is a well-known library it should be reasonably stable.

One important point to note is that the library is only free to use for non-commercial projects. You will need to negotiate a fee if you want to create something commercial.

Almost as important as the Bluetooth addition is mbedtls. This is a library that allows you to add cryptography to your applications. In particular, it provides easy ways to add HTTPS clients and servers to your applications. To make this even easier and more secure there is a new pico_rand module which uses the hardware entropy sources to generate cryptographically sound random numbers.

The whole WiFi driver support has been improved by the introduction of pico_async_context which formalizes the protection that you previously had to manually apply. This provides the usual three WiFi driver modes of poll, threadsafe_background and freertos.

You can still use cyw43_arch_lwip_begin and cyw43_arch_lwip_end, but they are now mapped to calls to pico_async_context_acquire_lock_blocking on the async context.

The updates are to the SDK and this means that all the new facilities are available to C programs. The MicroPython update hasn't been anounced yet. but it seems to support the new features via the experimental Bluetooth module.

It will be interesting to see what new projects result from these new facilities. The Pico is a remarkable microcontoller with facilities that would have been unthinkable just a short time ago.

• Harry Fairhead, I-Programmer's hardware guru, is the author of Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico/W in C and Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico/W in MicroPython, updated at the end of 2022 to cover the addition of WiFi capability to the original Pico. He is currently working on a more advanced title. His other books include Raspberry Pi IoT in C, 2nd Edition, Raspberry Pi IoT in C with Linux Drivers, Raspberry Pi IOT in Python with GPIO Zero, Raspberry Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers.
  

More Information

SDK 1.5.0

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