Raspberry Pi Pico vs ESP32

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 :

 

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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