Prices are checked against each store and labelled with when.
It checks today's price at every store, compares the alternatives and answers in about a minute.
A starter bundle built around the Raspberry Pi Pico, the RP2040 board with a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, 264KB of RAM and a clock up to 133 MHz. The kit adds unsoldered headers and a micro USB cable, so you can solder the headers, plug in and start programming in C or MicroPython by dragging a file over USB. The Pico's 26 GPIO pins, 3 analog inputs and 8 programmable I/O state machines give it far more flexible peripherals than a classic Arduino Uno, though it has no Wi-Fi and no built-in display or sensors beyond the chip's temperature sensor. It suits beginners and hobbyists who want a cheap, well-documented board to learn on, not someone after a solder-free, wireless-ready kit.
Availability unknown
Lowest price we've seen: $21.89 on Nov 1 at Sears. Tracked across 1 store since Nov 1.
Owners of the Pico board praise its documentation, price-to-performance and the PIO blocks that make custom peripherals easy. Common complaints are the lack of wireless and the need to solder headers on kits like this one.
This starter kit centers on a Raspberry Pi Pico board built around the RP2040 chip. The RP2040 has a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor with 264KB of internal RAM. It supports up to 16MB of off-chip flash, and its flexible clock runs up to 133 MHz.
The board has 26 multifunction GPIO pins, including 3 analog inputs. It also has 2 UART, 2 SPI and 2 I2C controllers, 16 PWM channels, and 8 programmable I/O (PIO) state machines for custom peripherals.
You can program the board in C or MicroPython. It also supports drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB.
