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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

I'm not impressed by it. It's got 264 kilobytes of RAM. That's so low, that you can't run Linux or BSD on it. I guess you'd need some DOS-like OS for it.

This chip sells for $8.45 which is ridiculously high for what it offers[1].

The price of $0.80 per chip non-W is impressively low however, I'll admit. [2] But once you throw shipping and other costs in, how much will it actually cost?

The Pi Zero 2 W at $15 is far far better than this chip. [3]

[1] https://www.pishop.ca/product/raspberry-pi-pico-w/

[2] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-direct-buy-rp2...

[3] https://www.microcenter.com/product/486575/raspberry-pi-zero...

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>>That's so low, that you can't run Linux or BSD on it. I guess you'd need some DOS-like OS for it.

Absolutely no offence, but I think you are absolutely, 100% missing the point of microcontrollers, like by a nautical mile. It's the kind of chip that you'd have inside a humidifier and it controls the fan turning on or off depending on the read from the humidity sensor. It absolutely doesn't need to run a full OS, and in fact it would be a detriment to it and its abilities.

I have several Pico Ws around the house acting as sensor boards and I wouldn't replace them with Zero Ws even if they were free - it's just a worse board for that kind of job.

Did you pay circa $8.45 for each of your Pico Ws?

My problem is the price point. At that price point, you can get a full power chip. The Pico W should be selling for $0.90 so, if it were to be good value.

I paid £5.90 each.

>>At that price point, you can get a full power chip.

You see, this is the problem right here - you got it in your head that this isn't a "full power chip", whatever that even means. It's as "full power" as any microcontroller that has ever existed.

Once again ,it isn't meant to run an OS. The price is more than justified by the rich development environment with plenty of support(both official and community driven) as well as good connectivity options implemented directly on the board. The closest thing I can think of is a cheap ESP8266 board like a D6 Mini, but cheap chinese clones of that sell for £4 on ebay, barely any cheaper than the Pico W - an official D6 board is about £12, so not only it costs more - it actually offers less functionality and power.

If you know what this chip is for and what it's competing against, you'd see that in fact the value here is outstanding.

By "full power", I mean that it's at least capable of running Linux.

Even like 64 MiB of RAM is probably sufficient to qualify as "full power".

"Full power" means you can use heavy language & heavy tools without worrying too much.

You're not forced into the "embedded"[1] ecosystem of tools/languages/libraries.

[1] Which typically are heavily limited variants of the full versions.

But one doesn’t (or shouldn’t) want “full power”, an OS and drivers, etc for simple things. You want simplicity, lower power consumption, small size, instant power-on, and a single deterministic thread. Imagine if your hairdryer, or toaster took 30s to boot before using just because someone preferred to program it using JavaScript instead of C.

It’s not about being forced into the embedded ecosystem, embedded is the right choice for the job in many cases. In fact it’s common to see hobbyists struggle trying to make a full featured raspberry pi work for simple use cases that are more well-suited to an arduino.

This is apples and oranges. Microcontrollers aren't meant to be SBCs.

While we don't yet have a Unix for Pico - correct me if I'm wrong - we have this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446251 - a small RetroBSD clone for an ARM, a Cortex-M0 one.

DOS-like OS is also possible... RetroBSD creator is apparently looking into it: https://vak.dreamwidth.org/982612.html

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