I’ve used the Pico Explorer Base for a while, and finally have spent enough time with the Pimoroni Explorer to make a fair comparison.
The Pico Explorer Base
I got a Pimoroni Pico Explorer Base a while ago, and I really like it for a few key things:
- Breadboarding initial ideas before breaking out a soldering iron.
- Debugging with a picoprobe (there are female headers to plug the debugger into).
- It has a built in display and buttons.
- Pimoroni provides a good library for developing for the Pico Explorer Base using c++.
In short, for me it’s a good environment to sketch new ideas before I’m ready to commit to soldering and mounting everything. I also really like that you can swap out the core chip, which means you can easily try newer chips with the same pinouts (more on that in a bit). The two things I don’t like:
- You have to solder headers onto your chip to use it with the base.
- Like the original Pico, it uses USB Micro.
The Pimoroni Explorer
Fast forward to the end of last year, when products based on the RP2350 chip started coming out. I was very excited about the possibility of doing more real-time audio and video processing thanks to the new floating point processor, and preordered the Pimoroni Explorer as soon as it was announced.
My unit arrived late last year, and I’ve spent enough time with it to get a sense of what I like and don’t like. The things I like:
- It has an RP2350 chip.
- It has a larger screen.
- It uses USB C.
- It has six user buttons instead of four.
- It has a better speaker.
However, there are a few key things I don’t like:
- As I’m writing this, Pimoroni’s pico c++ library doesn’t include support for the Pimoroni Explorer.
- The board doesn’t include wireless support.
- You can’t swap out the core of the unit with a new Pico 2 or compatible chip.
Some of these are show stoppers for my work with c++. I’m not ready to write my own definitions for the board and figure out all the SPI settings that were just taken care of in the c++ library for the Pico Explorer Base. I also don’t like being stuck without wireless and not being able to try out newer units, units with wireless, units with more memory, et cetera.
In short, I don’t see myself using this as my daily driver like I did with the Pico Explorer Base. Instead, I see it mainly as a place to play with MicroPython, as the support for the unit is good, and it’s easy to use (and debug) using tools like Thonny.
Final Thoughts
As the Pico and Pico 2 have the same header pin layout, I plan to try a Pico 2 with the old Pico Explorer Base just to see. With luck I’ll be able to keep using it, we’ll see…