Raspberry Pi has introduced a new Pico 2 W board based on the RP2350 microcontroller for just $7. This is reported by TechCrunch.
Conventional Raspberry Pi's are general-purpose single-board computers, while microcontrollers are specially designed to interact with other devices. Microcontrollers do not have a full-fledged operating system. Your code runs directly on the chip.
In addition to standard C and C++, the Pico 2 W supports the MicroPython programming language. The new board retains hardware and software compatibility with the previous generation of boards.
The Pico 2 W is equipped with a dual-core processor with a dual architecture operating at 150 MHz. When developing for the microcontroller, you can choose between a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open hardware Hazard 3 RISC-V cores.
The Pico 2 W has 4 MB of built-in flash memory for storing code, and the RP2350 has 520 KB of SRAM (static random access memory) on chip.
In terms of wireless capabilities, the Pico 2 W supports Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz 802.11n) and Bluetooth 5.2. If you don't need the wireless features for price or compliance certification reasons, Raspberry Pi also offers the Pico 2 without them for $5.
By the way, Raspberry Pi products are increasingly used in industry and electronics manufacturing. According to the company, 72% of its sales come from the industrial and embedded segment.