Pi Pico
Pico-family boards make up half this group; the rest are add-ons that do nothing without one. Sort out chip generation and wireless first: RP2040 or RP2350, plain or W.
The Raspberry Pi MCU line — Pico, Pico 2, and third-party boards on the same silicon — plus a deep bench of Pico-pinout displays, loggers, and radio modules that do nothing without a Pico plugged in.
- Raspberry Pi Pico W, Pico 2, and Pico 2 W are the anchors: Pico 2 moves to RP2350 (Cortex-M33 or RISC-V cores, more SRAM); only the W variants carry onboard 2.4 GHz wireless.
- Third-party boards put the same chips in different shapes: Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI output and MACROPAD RP2040, DFRobot Beetle RP2040, Waveshare RP2040-PiZero and RP2350-GEEK, and the Seeed Wio RP2040, which pairs the chip with an ESP8285 for Wi-Fi.
- Roughly half the group is Pico-pinout add-ons rather than standalone boards: Waveshare LCD and e-paper display modules, the DS3231 precision RTC, L76K GNSS module, and SIM868 GSM module all assume a Pico or Pico 2 mounted on top.
- Pimoroni Servo 2040 builds the RP2040 into an 18-channel servo controller — the MCU as the embedded brain of a dedicated tool rather than a general development board.
