KeithMukai on Nostr: Bit of nerd pedantry: Pico is Raspi's dev board for their RP2040 and RP2350 (Pico 2). ...
Bit of nerd pedantry: Pico is Raspi's dev board for their RP2040 and RP2350 (Pico 2). Pico / Pico 2 run on RP2040 / RP2350 microcontrollers. But RP2040 / RP2350 shouldn't be referred to as Picos.
And these two RP2350 dev boards in the pics above have an optional feature that the Pico 2 does not: additional PSRAM. The RP2040 had limited RAM (264kB) that could NOT be expanded, making it a less enticing option at the time. The RP2350 doubles the onboard RAM to 500kB but adds support for PSRAM expansion. So these third-party dev boards have 8MB on board!
So: RP2350, yes! Pico / Pico 2, no thanks!
As to your first question: sorta. Porting to MicroPython on ANY platform definitely makes it easier to support other microcontrollers. But a big problem with the esp32 ecosystem was its compiler. We got our work-in-progress port compiling for esp32-S2 (after much suffering) but never got esp32-S3 to compile. And even the S2 "success" was just too hacky to feel comfortable with trying to make that a viable path.
However, the future of esp32 is all RISC-V. I would hope that would make the compiler issues simpler (but really have no idea).
AND the RP2350 has two RISC-V cores onboard.
So what works for one RISC-V should ideally be easy to make work on another RISC-V (reality is never so kind, tho).
However... my initial RP2350 work will most likely focus instead on its two ARM cores (tho we'll see).
So... yeah, the answer is: sorta.
Your second question: The Pico 2 and these dev boards have NO wifi / bluetooth on board. There is a Pico W and expectation is that there'll be a Pico 2W soon. But obviously that doesn't interest us (and again, Pico 2 doesn't have the expanded RAM).
And these two RP2350 dev boards in the pics above have an optional feature that the Pico 2 does not: additional PSRAM. The RP2040 had limited RAM (264kB) that could NOT be expanded, making it a less enticing option at the time. The RP2350 doubles the onboard RAM to 500kB but adds support for PSRAM expansion. So these third-party dev boards have 8MB on board!
So: RP2350, yes! Pico / Pico 2, no thanks!
As to your first question: sorta. Porting to MicroPython on ANY platform definitely makes it easier to support other microcontrollers. But a big problem with the esp32 ecosystem was its compiler. We got our work-in-progress port compiling for esp32-S2 (after much suffering) but never got esp32-S3 to compile. And even the S2 "success" was just too hacky to feel comfortable with trying to make that a viable path.
However, the future of esp32 is all RISC-V. I would hope that would make the compiler issues simpler (but really have no idea).
AND the RP2350 has two RISC-V cores onboard.
So what works for one RISC-V should ideally be easy to make work on another RISC-V (reality is never so kind, tho).
However... my initial RP2350 work will most likely focus instead on its two ARM cores (tho we'll see).
So... yeah, the answer is: sorta.
Your second question: The Pico 2 and these dev boards have NO wifi / bluetooth on board. There is a Pico W and expectation is that there'll be a Pico 2W soon. But obviously that doesn't interest us (and again, Pico 2 doesn't have the expanded RAM).