Ask any tinkerer about their humble origins, and you’ll hear a bunch of folks mention the Raspberry Pi as the primary device that attracted them to DIY projects. However, it’s usually the Raspberry Pi single-board computers that get a lot of traction from hobbyists. Don’t get me wrong, this popularity is well deserved, but there’s another lineup of RPi devices that needs more recognition.

I’m talking about the Pico microcontrollers that have been making the rounds for a couple of years. Although the RPi SBCs knock them out of the park in the performance and OS compatibility fronts, the Pico series is better for security, robotics, and automation projects – to the point where they even include some extra features you wouldn’t find on mainline Raspberry Pi systems.

The Raspberry Pi Pico includes a built-in ADC

Mainline RPi SBCs require an adapter board

If you’re a fan of Home Assistant projects, you’ve probably bought a couple of sensors at some point. When you’ve got a conventional Raspberry Pi SBC, you shouldn’t have any issues pairing it with digital modules. Heck, that’s precisely how I built my first weather station to monitor temperature, pressure, and humidity fluctuations in my surroundings. However, things stop being so smooth when you switch the digital sensors with their analog counterparts.

That’s because Raspberry Pi SBCs can’t read analog inputs directly, meaning you’ll either have to invest in a dedicated sensor HAT or grab an Analog-to-Digital converter just to pair the board with an analog input device. Depending on your precision requirements, this can cost a few bucks and add to the overall budget of your DIY experiment.

On the other hand, the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller ships with a 12-bit ADC, allowing it to accept analog inputs from a variety of different modules, including photo-resistors, potentiometers, and weather-related sensors. As long as you’ve got the programming expertise, you can pair it with any ol’ sensor and use it for Home Assistant-powered automation projects. Heck, it can even monitor voltages up to 3.3V, making it just as effective for circuit experiments.

PIO state machines are a lot simpler to use when you’ve got Pico boards

The lower OS overhead is quite handy, too

Technically, the mainline RPi boards didn’t feature Programmable I/O blocks until the release of the Raspberry Pi 5. But even then, the Raspberry Pi 5 features the RP1 (not to be confused with the first SBC from the uber-popular family) I/O controller that uses PIOLib to provide PIO capabilities. Unfortunately, documentation on it is really sparse, making it a lot harder to implement in projects.

In contrast, the original Raspberry Pi Pico includes 8 PIO state machines split across 2 blocks, and you can program them to connect to sensors, servos, displays, and everything in between. The Pico 2 ups this number to 12 state machines scattered across 3 blocks, so you can interface even more peripherals with the microcontroller. Better yet, the PIO state machines work independently of the CPU, and since the microcontroller houses the heavily-documented chip RP2040, you can use them to build everything from custom gamepads to matrix displays.

Not to mention, you also have to deal with the extra overhead caused by the underlying operating system on a Raspberry Pi SBC, which can be a deal-breaker for projects where you need minimal latency. Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi Pico lets you program the GPIO pins directly, and MicroPython libraries are the only thing you need to keep in mind when creating projects with it. You can even write flash code onto your Pico board from ESPHome, Arduino IDE, or even the Thonny app running on a Raspberry Pi SBC.

The Pico wins on the pricing front

It also has a smaller footprint and siphons less power

Let’s say you want to build a circuit project that requires you to solder a bunch of sensors to the Raspberry Pi board. With how expensive Raspberry Pi SBCs have become lately, you’ll have to contend with the fact that you probably won’t be able to reuse this system for other projects. Worse still, if your DIY experiments involve a lot of trial-and-error, you could end up bricking your tinkering companion.

Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi Pico units cost as low as $4 for the original version and $5 for the second iteration – and that’s a lot cheaper than the overly inflated price tags of mainline SBCs. So, you can buy a couple of these boards and use them in your experiments without worrying about wasting $50+ on a botched experiment. The small size of the Pico also helps for projects where you need a minimal footprint, and since these microcontrollers consume less than 1W of energy, you can throw in any old cable instead of investing in expensive charging bricks.

But you can still use your old RPi SBC on Pico-centric projects

With the Pico series being microcontrollers, the mainline Raspberry Pi boards are far more versatile than their cheaper cousins. In fact, you can use them for hundreds of projects that are typically associated with Pico units, and I’d even recommend going down the SBC route when you’re a beginner. But for DIY enthusiasts with some experience in advanced projects, you shouldn’t ignore the perks of Pico boards when putting together complex circuit designs and sensor-based automations.