A year and a half after the debut of the $4 RP2040-powered Raspberry Pi Pico, the company is shipping a wireless-enabled version: the $6 Pico W.

At first glance, things look similar. The 21mm x 51mm form factor is unchanged and the RP2040 microcontroller sits at the heart of things. The CPU? Still a dual core Arm Cortex-M0+ running at 133MHz and there is 264KB of on-chip SRAM and 2MB of on-board QSPI flash.

However, the hulking silver block lurking on the board indicates that something is quite different about the Pi Pico W. In this case, 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless networking replete with an on-board antenna.

The wireless interface merits a deeper look and uses the Infineon CYW43439 replete with Wi-Fi 4 and WPA3. The antenna is an onboard device licensed from ABRACON and the whole wireless interface is connected via SPI to the RP2040.

All told, it is a worthy update. However, it also a (relatively) expensive update. Where the original Pico cost $4, the Pico W's price is $6. This brings it within touching distance of the Pi Zero W and a short hop to the Pi Zero 2 W (if you can find one).

The Register asked Pi boss Eben Upton to explain the 50 per cent premium for the privilege of working wirelessly. He said: "Broadly speaking it represents the cost of the wireless modem and associated RF components (everything under the can.)

"Some cost increase can be attributed to the PCB (jumps from 2 to 4 layers) and the PMIC on the chip (higher current design to supply both RP2040 and the Wi-Fi chip.)"

Upton went on to tell us that around 50,000 units would be in the channel for launch "with a lot of pipeline behind it."

"It's taken longer than we expected to get the production test up to full speed," he added, "but we're there now."

He went on to say that there was the potential to build roughly two million units between now and the end of the year. Not that there was the expectation to do quite so many, "but it's great to have a product which is to all intents and purposes unconstrained in volume."

Constrained is certainly a word that springs to mind when considering several of the company's other products, which seem to be made of unobtainium thanks to the supply chain woes afflicting businesses.

The Raspberry Pi team provided us with a Pico W to take for a spin, and we had few problems getting MicroPython up and running via a terminal session on our Windows 11 PC (with the Pico connected via USB.) So far so usual.

Not so usual was the ability to scan for access points, demonstrating the new wireless tech was both up and running and easily accessible. The option to operate in both station and access-point modes should make for some intriguing use cases.

It is also possible access network functionality via C, but we stuck with MicroPython during our experimentation.

While the Pi 4 Model B remains resolutely sold out at time of writing (although tools exist to scan retailers for stock) the Pico can be picked up relatively easily. The same will hopefully apply to the Pico W which can be bought individually or in 480-unit reels aimed at automated assembly. ®

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is the latest networking outfit to add Wi-Fi 6E capability to its hardware, opening up access to the less congested 6GHz spectrum for business users.

The France-based company just revealed the OmniAccess Stellar 14xx series of wireless access points, which are set for availability from this September. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise said its first Wi-Fi 6E device will be a high-end "premium" Access Point and will be followed by a mid-range product by the end of the year.

Wi-Fi 6E is compatible with the Wi-Fi 6 standard, but adds the ability to use channels in the 6GHz portion of the spectrum, a feature that will be built into the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard from the start. This enables users to reduce network contention, or so the argument goes, as the 6GHz portion of the spectrum is less congested with other traffic than the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies used for Wi-Fi access.

Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are being promoted as technologies for enabling industrial automation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) thanks to features that provide more reliable communications and reduced costs compared with wired network alternatives, at least according to the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA).

The WBA’s Wi-Fi 6/6E for IIoT working group, led by Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, and Intel, has pulled together ideas on the future of networked devices in factories and written it all up in a “Wi-Fi 6/6E for Industrial IoT: Enabling Wi-Fi Determinism in an IoT World” manifesto.

The detailed whitepaper makes the case that wireless communications has become the preferred way to network sensors as part of IIoT deployments because it's faster and cheaper than fiber or copper infrastructure. The alliance is a collection of technology companies and service providers that work together on developing standards, coming up with certifications and guidelines, advocating for stuff that they want, and so on.

Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.

The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.

The Wireless LAN market was battered by a choppy supply chain in the first quarter of 2022 and lockdowns in China are compounding the problem, according to analysis by Dell'Oro Group.

Many organizations have scheduled network upgrades, but supply is not able to keep pace with demand and backlogs are reportedly 10 to 15 times greater than they were pre-pandemic.

Several manufacturers have cited components from second and third-tier suppliers as the cause of the bottleneck, Dell'Oro said, which means that the problem may not be a shortage of Wi-Fi silicon, but rather of secondary components that are nevertheless necessary to make a complete product.

New York City this week ripped out its last municipally-owned payphones from Times Square to make room for Wi-Fi kiosks from city infrastructure project LinkNYC.

"NYC's last free-standing payphones were removed today; they'll be replaced with a Link, boosting accessibility and connectivity across the city," LinkNYC said via Twitter.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said, "Truly the end of an era but also, hopefully, the start of a new one with more equity in technology access!"

AMD and Qualcomm have rolled out a joint effort that brings remote management capabilities over Wi-Fi for AMD business systems, potentially boosting their appeal for corporate IT departments.

The two companies said they were working together to improve Qualcomm's FastConnect wireless kit for AMD compute platforms based on the Ryzen chips for desktops and laptops. The starting point for this is AMD Ryzen-powered business laptops using Qualcomm's FastConnect 6900 system that delivers Wi-Fi 6 and 6E plus Bluetooth 5.3, supporting Wi-Fi connection speeds up to 3.6Gbps.

Remote management is enabled by the combination of the AMD Manageability Processor now embedded in Ryzen PRO 6000 systems and the FastConnect 6900 system, AMD and Qualcomm said, with support for the DASH client management standard developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

The Turing Pi 2 crowdfunding campaign has soared passed its $64,000 goal in a single day, currently standing at $1,027,428 with more than 3,400 backers.

Early-bird backers will be able to build their own Arm cluster in a box for $199 (compute modules come extra). Now the entry-level pledge stands at $219 for one Turing Pi 2 Cluster Board.

We covered the Turing Pi 2 at the end of last year and at last the waiting is over – in principle at least. It has been a year and a half since Turing Machines initially announced the product, and a good nine months since it published the specifications.

Qualcomm is sampling its Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro Series chips aimed at throughput of more than 10Gbps for enterprise access points, gateways, and premium home routers.

The third generation of the chipmaker's Networking Pro Series platforms is set to "initiate a new era" of 10Gbps Wi-Fi, Qualcomm claimed, stating that the new portfolio is optimized for multi-user environments and low CPU utilization to power collaboration, telepresence, and metaverse applications for both home and enterprise environments.

Sampling means that the Networking Pro silicon is available to Qualcomm's OEM customers so they can develop and test the Wi-Fi 7 products that will ship to end users at some point. It isn't clear when buyers will actually be able to get their hands on kit to deploy, although Qualcomm previously said it expects to see Wi-Fi 7 products hit the market in 2023.

Businesses shouldn't wait for Wi-Fi 7 networking kit when Wi-Fi 6E can give them significant advantages today.

So says the Wi-Fi Alliance, which disputes the message coming from parts of the industry that Wi-Fi 6E will only see limited adoption because of supply chain issues that might cause buyers to hold off until Wi-Fi 7 is available. Some netizens and organizations have lately complained it can take six months, a year, or more for Wi-Fi 6E equipment they ordered to arrive.

Wi-Fi 6E builds on Wi-Fi 6, which was finalized as the 802.11ax standard in 2019, saw early products in 2020, and started to be widely adopted in 2021. Wi-Fi 6E is essentially the same, but adds the ability to use frequencies in the 6GHz portion of the wireless spectrum as well as the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. It follows moves by regulators in the US and elsewhere to open up the 6GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi use.

The astonishing PicoPuter emulation project can run a transputer emulator on multiple Raspberry Pi Picos, and clustering them using the transputer's native inter-processor link protocol.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a surprisingly capable device at $4 apiece, and one of its less well-known features is its eight programmable IO state-machines on board. As programmer-archaeologist Andrew Menadue wrote in a blog post:

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