raspberry pi pico (opens in new tab) I would love to mimic the form factor, but the Banana Pi is better and borrows a name. The BPI-PicoW-S3 is CNX software (opens in new tab)is a new microcontroller board with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in addition to the ESP32-S3 dual-core chip.
Serves as a direct competitor to the new (Raspberry Pi) Pico W (opens in new tab)The (Banana Pi) PicoW is powered by a 240MHz dual-core Tensilica LX7 microcontroller with vector instructions (important for AI and signal processing workloads), backed by 512kb of RAM and running faster than its name suggests. The board has 2MB of flash, plus Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5LE. Power and data are supplied via the micro USB port. It has a small reset button and everything fits in the exact same 51x21mm (2×0.8in) dimensions as the (Raspberry Pi) Pico.
Expressif Systems’ ESP32-S3 features a pair of 32-bit cores and a ULP core for low power modes. Wi-Fi is limited to the 2.4 GHz band, but Bluetooth implementations include long-range support with data rates up to 2 Mbps. There are 44 programmable GPIOs, but just like the Raspberry Pi Pico, only 27 are available in the pinout, but assuming a large number of fingers, there is a maximum GPIO for capacitive touch input. 14 can be configured. Onboard security uses the AES-XTS algorithm for flash encryption and has secure boot with RSA and digital signatures. The chip also supports a “world controller” mode. This allows two non-interfering execution environments to implement a trusted execution environment or permission isolation mechanism.
The GPIO pinouts are almost identical on both boards, but there are some minor differences. The Banana Pi Pico can be programmed using the same languages as the Raspberry Pi board (MicroPython, Arduino, C), although the C framework is different. Use ESP-IDF instead of Pico SDK. Documentation is currently sparse, full use of the board may require some programming experience, and the chip’s support for neural network acceleration vector instructions is “coming soon.”
The board is now AliExpress (opens in new tab) The price is $5.50, but shipping to the US costs an additional $7.49. The delivery date is now mid-October.For comparison, Raspberry Pi Pico same site (opens in new tab) It costs $3.70 and shipping is $2.34, but it arrives in a week.
