You can get the Raspberry Pi Pico on Amazon for just under $4 plus shipping costs. The much older ESP32 you get in various forms for just under $10. You see, you get the ESP32 for a little more money with additional sensors or a display to display sensor data (or even the IP address of the microcontroller) or a camera. On the Raspberry Pi Pico, there are quite new chip RP2040 installed which was developed under the ARM license. The ESP32 chip from Espressif is much elder. Here is a table which will give you some information to compare.
| Raspberry PI Pico | ESP32 | |
|---|---|---|
| Microcontrollers | Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ (32-bit) | Dual-Core Tensilica LX6 (32-bit) |
| Clock speed | up to 133 MHz | up to 240 MHz |
| Current & Voltage | ||
| operating voltage | 5V | 3.3V / 5V |
| power consumption | 11mA | |
| input voltage | 1.8V to 5.5V | |
| current consumption via GPIO | 5μA in deep sleep | |
| memory | ||
| Flash | 2MB | 4MB |
| SRAM | 264KB | 520KB |
| GPIOs | 30 GPIOs, | 26x digital I/O (PWM), 10x capacitive touch, 12x analog inputs, 2x analog outputs |
| Interfaces | 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 2x UART | 2x I2C, 2x I2S, 1x IR, 4x SPI, 3x UART, Bluetooth, WiFi |
| Dimensions (WxL) | 22mm x 51mm |
Differences in programming ESP32 & Pi Pico
If you have flashed the ESP32 with the firmware for MicroPython, you can program it with MicroPython. Thus, you can operate both microcontrollers with the same programming language. As a development environment, the various IDEs for MicroPython are available here:
- MU Editor,
- Thonny,
- Eclipse IDE,
- uPyCraft
However, you can also flash the ESP32 for ESP Easy and thus there is no programming and you can easily configure the sensors & actuators via a website. You can use Arduino IDE for both of them :
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1 2 | https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/program-raspberry-pi-pico-with-arduino-ide |
Differences in powering ESP32 & Pi Pico
ESP32 needs a thoughtful, well-researched power supply. Pi Pico can operate from 1.8 to 5.5 V. A Li-Ion battery or 2 x AA batteries can be directly connected to Pi Pico.
Final Thought
If I had to choose between a Raspberry Pi Pico and an ESP32, I would resort to the latter. As already mentioned, the ESP32 has clear advantages over the Pi Pico due to the Bluetooth & WiFi interface. But the Pico is much cheaper, i.e. for low-cost projects without Bluetooth or WiFi this is ideal. Raspberry Pi Pico is for children while ESP32 is a powerful, low-cost microcontroller that is used in some products. Arduino Uno consumes a low amount of power but it has the slowest processor.
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