Your Raspberry Pi Pico W Supports Bluetooth Now

The Raspberry Pi Pico W is nearing its first birthday. And now, it’s gaining a new feature—Bluetooth connectivity. You don’t even need to buy a new Pi Pico W to enable Bluetooth. Just install the 1.5.1 C SDK and read through the Pi Foundation’s documentation to get started.

Raspberry Pi Pico W is an affordable microcontroller with Wi-Fi (and now Bluetooth) connectivity. It’s mainly intended for IOT devices, though you can use it for a variety of creative projects. The addition of Bluetooth will allow you to stream audio from Pi Pico W, though it’ll also let you connect small wireless accessories, such as keyboards or custom controllers.

This may sound a bit odd, but the Pi Pico W’s hardware was always capable of supporting Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth LE. Its firmware simply didn’t support Bluetooth functionality (until now, of course).

If you want to add Bluetooth functionality to your Pi Pico, install the 1.5.1 C SDK firmware. You should also check out some of the Bluetooth examples published by the Pi Foundation.