RPi recently announced the Pico 2, but while we are all waiting for the more useful Pico 2W, with WiFi, the tiny Pimoroni outfit has produced something better - the Pico Plus 2 with WiFi. What is going on?

Raspberry Pi is now a fully-floated public company and as such it can't really allow the ball to drop, but unless there is some other extenuating reason it just did. The Pico has been hugely successful and the announcement of the Pico 2 was hardly a surprise, although the fuss about the hardware error it contained was.

The problem is outlined in Errata E9 which causes GPIO input lines to stick at about 2V after going high for the first time. To make it work you need to add an external 9K resistor. Of course, this ruins the high impedance nature of the input. It also makes any attempt at an open collector bus fairly impossible. The problem is caused by leakage current from the output side of the PAD and there is no easy fix other than to modify the chip.

This has caused a lot of problems, not just for Pico users but for companies designing the RP2350 into their own devices. It looks as if a lot of designs are going to have to wait for the next stepping of the chip and Raspberry Pi hasn't said that such a thing is underway, let alone given a date for it to happen. 

Given Raspberry Pi now has a share price to look after, such mistakes are not good and, while until recently the community might have cut them some slack, this doesn't come as easy for a for-profit company.

Never mind, all will be forgiven with the release of the Pico 2W - the one with WiFi. Except that now we have an alternative.

Pimoroni, an official Pi reseller and designer of a lot of Pi addons, has just released the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2W with more memory - 16Mbytes v 4Mbytes of Flash and 8MB v 0.5M of RAM. It also has five additional GPIO lines and it uses a USB-C rather than micro USB connector. This is the Pico that Raspberry Pi should have produced in the first place.

To add to the shame, the Pico Plus 2W has WiFi and so is the 2W we are waiting for.

The worry with such non-standard devices is that they might do WiFi in a different way from the real device and hence not work with the official SDK. In this case, however, there should be no worries as Pimoroni is using the official Pi RM2 Wi-Fi module, based on the same Infineon CYW43439 chip as in the original Pico 2W.

Although we don't have the exact facts yet, the RM2 looks as if it is going to be the WiFi module that the Pico 2W will use. It will also probably be the basis for WiFi on all future Pis. After all, the more that Raspberry Pi can make the hardware their own, the more they are protected against other manufacturers eating their lunch. This is the thinking behind the RPI 5 and its custom RPI 1 bridge controller chip. It may be based on a 2040 pico chip, but it isn't for sale and so producing a clone of the RPi 5 is very difficult.

Of course, if you make a custom device and then offer it to your competitors, then you lose any protection that not selling it provides.

This seems to be what has happened with Pimoroni. It has been able to get hold of a supply of RM2 modules and has put this together with an RP2350 chip and made a better Pico. The Pico Plus 2W will have a challenger when the Pico 2W appears, but if we are waiting for a fix for E9 this could be quite a while.

If it wasn't for my thalassoharpaxophobia, I'd buy one asap.

I do hope that Pimoroni don't suffer any future discrimination for showing Raspberry Pi how things should be done.

• Harry Fairhead, I-Programmer's hardware guru, is the author of Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico/W in C, Second Edition and Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico in MicroPython, Second Edition and the more advanced title, Master the Raspberry Pi Pico in C: WiFi with lwIP & mbedtls. His other books include Raspberry Pi IOT in C, 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

Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W

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