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It's more like an Arduino in the sense that the code you write is more like firmware.

It's way more powerful than a common Arduino, though. It has two 32-bit (ARM Cortex-M0+) cores, 264kB of RAM, and 2MB of flash. The Pico W also has a wireless chip that can do WiFi and Bluetooth (the standard Pico is exactly the same without the wireless chip).

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I see, so it's kinda halfway between a standard Pi and an arduino then? You can code on it, but it can't run an OS or anything?

That still seems suuuuper useful. I'm going to have to give that a look, thanks for the info!

It is big enough that it makes sense to run some kind of small RTOS on it, especially given the dual core nature of the thing.

> You can code on it, but it can't run an OS or anything?

You can run small embedded RTOSes such as FreeRTOS and NuttX and others I'm not aware of on it. Nothing like the desktop Linux that runs on the bigger raspberries, still very useful for development.

https://www.freertos.org/

https://github.com/smittytone/RP2040-FreeRTOS

https://nuttx.apache.org/

https://nuttx.apache.org/docs/latest/platforms/arm/rp2040/in...

To pile on the list of supported RTOSes, my favorite has supported the Pi pico for a while.

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/arm/rpi_pico/do...

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