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Choosing the Right Raspberry Pi Product

Summary

This chapter surveys the Raspberry Pi Foundation's product line -- the Pico, Pico W, Pico 2, Pi 500+, and Pi 5 -- and explains the underlying hardware distinctions between microcontrollers and single-board computers, including the RP2040, RP2350, and Broadcom BCM2712 chips that power them. It introduces a product decision framework that weighs price tier, total cost of ownership, device lifespan, and hardware compatibility against a project's goals. Because component prices have shifted during the 2025-2026 RAM shortage, the chapter also covers classroom budgeting and bulk purchasing considerations educators need before committing to a hardware tier. Readers finishing this chapter will be able to recommend the right board for a given budget, grade level, and project goal.

Concepts Covered

This chapter covers the following 22 concepts from the learning graph:

  1. Raspberry Pi Foundation
  2. Raspberry Pi Pico
  3. Raspberry Pi Pico W
  4. Raspberry Pi Pico 2
  5. Raspberry Pi 500+
  6. Raspberry Pi 5
  7. Microcontroller
  8. Single Board Computer
  9. System On Chip
  10. RP2040 Chip
  11. RP2350 Chip
  12. Broadcom BCM2712
  13. Clock Speed
  14. RAM Shortage
  15. Price Tier
  16. Total Cost Of Ownership
  17. Product Decision Framework
  18. Classroom Budget
  19. Bulk Purchasing
  20. Device Lifespan
  21. Hardware Compatibility
  22. Vendor Documentation

Prerequisites

This chapter assumes only the prerequisites listed in the course description.

Time to Go Shopping — Sort Of

Berry waving welcome Before you can build anything, you need the right board on your workbench. In this chapter we'll tour the whole Raspberry Pi Foundation product line and build a framework for picking the right one every time — no guessing, no overspending. Let's build something!

Every project in this book starts with the same question: which board do I actually need? The Raspberry Pi Foundation is the UK-based nonprofit organization that designs and maintains the entire hardware family this course covers, from a $4 board the size of a stick of gum to a full desktop computer built into a keyboard. Its mission is to put affordable, well-documented computing hardware into the hands of learners, and that mission shows up directly in how the product line is organized: cheap, simple boards for a first project, and more capable (and more expensive) boards for projects that outgrow the simple ones. This chapter builds the mental map you'll use for the rest of the book — and every time you plan a new project on your own.

Two Families, One Foundation

Every board the Raspberry Pi Foundation sells falls into one of two families, and the difference between them explains almost everything else in this chapter. A microcontroller is a small, low-power computer chip designed to run a single program repeatedly, with no operating system and no desktop — it turns on, starts running your code immediately, and does nothing else. A single board computer (often abbreviated SBC) is a complete, general-purpose computer built onto one circuit board, capable of running a full operating system like Linux, juggling multiple programs at once, and supporting a keyboard, mouse, and monitor the way a laptop does.

Both families are built around the same basic idea: cram all the essential parts of a computer onto a single chip. That chip is called a system on chip (SoC) — an integrated circuit that combines a processor, memory controller, and input/output circuitry into one physical package instead of wiring together separate chips on a circuit board. Every board in this chapter's product line is built around one central SoC, and knowing which SoC is inside a board tells you most of what you need to know about its capability.

Berry's Key Insight

Berry thinking Here's the shortcut: if a board needs an SD card or a separate storage drive to hold an operating system, it's a single board computer. If it just needs you to copy a Python file onto it and it starts running immediately, it's a microcontroller. That one question sorts every board you'll meet in this book.

The Microcontroller Line: Pico, Pico W, and Pico 2

The Raspberry Pi Pico is the Foundation's original microcontroller board — a bare circuit board about the size of a stick of gum, with two rows of pins along the edges for plugging directly into a breadboard. It costs around four dollars, has no wireless capability, and is the board most projects in the early chapters of this book are built around. The Pico runs on a chip called the RP2040 chip, an SoC designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation itself rather than bought from an outside chipmaker. The RP2040 combines two processor cores, a modest amount of built-in memory, and the circuitry needed to talk to sensors and actuators, all on one small chip. Most retailers also stock a Raspberry Pi Pico H — electrically identical to the plain Pico, but with the two pin headers pre-soldered onto the board at the factory — for about a dollar more. It saves a beginner the trouble of soldering their own headers before a first breadboard project, which makes it a popular choice for classrooms.

The Raspberry Pi Pico W is nearly identical to the plain Pico, with one addition: built-in Wi-Fi (and, on later revisions, Bluetooth Low Energy) hardware, letting a project connect to the internet or talk to other nearby devices without any extra components. It costs a few dollars more than the plain Pico and is the board you'll reach for any time a project needs to send data somewhere or receive a command remotely — a topic this book covers in more depth in the wireless communication chapter.

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is the newer, faster sibling of the original Pico, built around the RP2350 chip instead of the RP2040. The RP2350 keeps the same two-row pin layout and the same beginner-friendly workflow, but adds more processing cores, more built-in memory, and a faster clock speed — the rate, measured in megahertz or gigahertz, at which a chip's internal clock ticks and advances its processor through instructions. A higher clock speed generally means a chip can execute more instructions per second, which matters for projects doing heavier math (like real-time color calculations across a long NeoPixel strip) but makes little difference for a project that's mostly waiting on a button press. As with the original Pico, a wireless sibling exists here too: the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W pairs the same Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy hardware found on the Pico W with the newer, faster RP2350 chip, making it the board to reach for when a project needs both extra processing headroom and a network connection.

Berry's Tip

Berry sharing a tip Don't pick a board by clock speed alone. A faster chip is nice, but it's rarely the deciding factor for a K-12 project — availability, price, and whether your code from an earlier project still works on it usually matter more. We'll build a proper framework for this a bit further into the chapter.

Before we compare all five boards side by side, let's look at an interactive way to explore how the Pico family's specs stack up against each other and against the two single-board computers introduced next.

Diagram: Raspberry Pi Product Family Explorer

Run the Raspberry Pi Product Family Explorer MicroSim fullscreen

Raspberry Pi Product Family Explorer (interactive infographic)

Type: interactive-infographic sim-id: raspberry-pi-product-family-explorer
Library: p5.js
Template: https://github.com/dmccreary/moving-rainbow/tree/main/docs/sims/pico-hardware-overview
Status: Specified

Learning objective: Students will compare (Bloom L4: Analyze) the price, chip, memory, and wireless capability of the Raspberry Pi Pico, Pico W, Pico 2, Pi 500+, and Pi 5.

Canvas: 700x480px default, responsive — recompute a cardWidth from windowWidth inside windowResized() so five cards lay out in a single row above 900px, a 3+2 grid between 500-900px, and a single scrollable column below 500px.

Layout: five vertical cards, one per board (Pico, Pico W, Pico 2, Pi 500+, Pi 5), each showing a simple silhouette icon drawn with basic p5.js shapes (a small rectangle with two pin rows for the Picos, a keyboard-shaped rectangle for the Pi 500+, a squarer board shape for the Pi 5), the board's name, and its approximate price tag. Color the microcontroller cards indigo (#3F51B5) and the single-board-computer cards circuit green (#2E7D32) so the two-family split from the chapter text is visible at a glance.

Controls: a createSelect() dropdown labeled "Compare by" with options "Price," "Chip," "Clock Speed," and "Wireless" (default: "Price"). Changing the dropdown re-sorts the five cards left-to-right by the selected attribute and updates a small value label on each card.

Interaction: clicking any card expands it in place to reveal four data rows — Chip (RP2040 / RP2350 / BCM2712), Clock Speed, RAM, and Wireless (Yes/No) — pulled from the product comparison table in the surrounding chapter text. Clicking an expanded card collapses it again. Only one card is expanded at a time. Hovering a card (non-touch devices) shows a one-line tooltip summarizing what tier of project it fits best (e.g., "Best for: first breadboard projects").

Implementation: p5.js. Store board data as an array of five objects {name, price, chip, clockSpeed, ram, wireless, family}. Draw cards with rect(), sort the array in place when the dropdown changes, and animate card position changes with a simple lerp() over a few frames rather than an instant jump. Parent the canvas to the enclosing <div> and recalculate layout inside windowResized().

The Single-Board Computer Line: Pi 500+ and Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 500+ is a single board computer built directly into a keyboard — you plug it into a monitor and a power supply and you have a complete desktop Linux computer, with the added feature of individually programmable RGB lighting under every key (a project this book returns to in a later chapter). The Raspberry Pi 5 is the Foundation's flagship single board computer, sold as a bare circuit board rather than a keyboard, designed for projects that need maximum processing power, camera input, or an AI accelerator add-on board.

Both boards are built around the same underlying chip family: Broadcom BCM2712, a system on chip designed by Broadcom (an outside chipmaker, unlike the RP2040 and RP2350, which the Raspberry Pi Foundation designed itself) and licensed for use in the Pi 500+ and Pi 5. The BCM2712 packs four processor cores running at a much higher clock speed than either Pico chip, along with dedicated circuitry for video and camera processing — capability a microcontroller's SoC simply doesn't include, because a microcontroller was never meant to run a full operating system or decode video.

Now that all five core boards and their chips have been introduced, the table below lets you see the whole product line in one place, including the pre-soldered Pico H and wireless Pico 2 W variants.

Board Family Chip Approx. Price Wireless
Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontroller RP2040 ~$4 No
Raspberry Pi Pico H Microcontroller RP2040 ~$5 (headers pre-soldered) No
Raspberry Pi Pico W Microcontroller RP2040 ~$6 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE
Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Microcontroller RP2350 ~$5 No
Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W Microcontroller RP2350 ~$7 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE
Raspberry Pi 500+ Single board computer Broadcom BCM2712 ~$280-400+ (RAM-shortage pricing, 16GB) Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Raspberry Pi 5 Single board computer Broadcom BCM2712 ~$85-205+ (board only, RAM-shortage pricing, RAM-config dependent) Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

Berry's Price Alert

Berry warning Look closely at those last two rows — the single board computers. The Pi 500+ and Pi 5 prices above are two to three times what they were before 2025 because of the ongoing RAM shortage, not because the boards themselves changed. The Pico-family boards barely moved, because they use a tiny amount of on-chip memory rather than the commodity RAM chips caught up in the shortage. More on why in the next section.

Berry's Key Insight

Berry thinking Notice the price doesn't just track "how good is the chip" — it also tracks "what else are you buying." The Pi 500+'s price includes a keyboard, case, and RGB lighting hardware. The Pi 5 board alone is cheaper, but you'll need to add a power supply, storage, and probably a case before it's a working computer. Total cost always includes more than the sticker price, which is exactly where we're headed next.

Before we move from specs to spending, let's put the two families side by side so the microcontroller-versus-SBC distinction is easy to click through rather than just read.

Diagram: Microcontroller vs. Single Board Computer

Run the Microcontroller vs. Single Board Computer MicroSim fullscreen

Microcontroller vs. Single Board Computer (interactive comparison)

Type: interactive-infographic sim-id: microcontroller-vs-sbc-comparison
Library: p5.js
Status: Specified

Learning objective: Students will differentiate (Bloom L4: Analyze) microcontrollers from single board computers based on operating system support, cost, power draw, and typical use case.

Canvas: 700x420px, responsive — two panel widths recomputed as fractions of windowWidth inside windowResized(), stacking vertically below 500px instead of side by side.

Layout: two large panels side by side, left panel labeled "Microcontroller" (indigo #3F51B5 background) showing a Pico-style icon, right panel labeled "Single Board Computer" (circuit green #2E7D32 background) showing a Pi 5-style icon. Each panel lists five short attribute rows: "Runs an operating system?", "Typical price", "Typical power draw", "Boots in", and "Best for".

Interaction: clicking any attribute row (e.g., "Runs an operating system?") highlights that row in both panels simultaneously and opens a small infobox beneath the diagram explaining the contrast in one or two sentences, written from the definitions given in the surrounding chapter prose. A "Show All" toggle button (createButton()) expands every infobox at once for review; clicking it again collapses them. Only relevant when a row hasn't already been expanded individually.

Implementation: p5.js. Store the five attribute rows as an array of objects {label, mcuValue, sbcValue, explanation}, rendered as two parallel columns of text with textAlign(LEFT, CENTER). Hit-test each row via a bounding rectangle spanning both panels at that row's y-position, so a single click reveals both sides' data plus the shared infobox.

What a Board Really Costs You

The price printed on a board's product page is only the starting point. A price tier is a category of hardware grouped by approximate cost — the same grouping the course description uses to organize this book into five ascending tiers, from a $4 Pico up to a $70-plus AI accelerator setup. Knowing a board's price tier helps you plan a budget quickly, but it hides two things a careful buyer needs to check: whether that price is stable, and what else you'll need to buy alongside it.

Component prices are not fixed. A RAM shortage is a supply disruption in the memory-chip manufacturing industry that reduces the availability of RAM chips and drives up prices across many products that depend on them — including, during 2025 and 2026, several boards and HATs in the Raspberry Pi product line. The single board computers have been hit hardest: the Raspberry Pi 5 and Raspberry Pi 500+ both rely on off-chip DRAM, and that same type of memory chip is in enormous demand from data centers building out AI infrastructure. Raspberry Pi Foundation has raised Pi 5 and Pi 500+ prices more than once since late 2025 as a direct result, with higher-RAM configurations (like the Pi 5 16GB and the Pi 500+) seeing the steepest increases. Industry analysts covering the memory market expect this AI-driven demand to keep RAM prices elevated for roughly the next two to three years, so don't expect Pi 5 and Pi 500+ prices to snap back to their pre-shortage lows anytime soon. This is exactly why this book treats pricing as approximate and revisits it directly in the budgeting chapter later in the course.

Price alone also hides the cost of everything a board needs to actually work. Total cost of ownership is the full cost of using a piece of hardware over its useful life, including the board itself plus every accessory, replacement part, and ongoing expense required to keep it running — a power supply, an SD card for a single board computer, replacement jumper wires, or a case to protect it from classroom handling. A $4 Pico with a $15 breadboard kit built around it has a real total cost closer to $20, while a Pi 5 board — now priced well above its original $60 launch price because of the RAM shortage — often needs another $30-50 in power supply, storage, and cooling before it's usable.

That total cost matters more, not less, the longer a board stays in service. Device lifespan is the length of time a board remains usable and supported before it becomes obsolete, damaged beyond repair, or unable to run current software. A board with a short lifespan — say, one prone to overheating under classroom conditions, or one the manufacturer stops supporting with software updates — can end up costing more per year of use than a pricier board that lasts twice as long.

Before we chart how a RAM shortage actually moves prices over time, let's define one more term this chart will use. Bulk purchasing is buying many identical units of hardware at once, often at a reduced per-unit price, which is the strategy most classrooms use to outfit an entire room of students with the same board.

Diagram: RAM Shortage Price Impact

Run the RAM Shortage Price Impact MicroSim fullscreen

RAM Shortage Price Impact (interactive chart)

Type: chart sim-id: ram-shortage-price-impact
Library: Chart.js
Status: Specified

Learning objective: Students will analyze (Bloom L4: Analyze) how a component shortage changes hardware price tiers and per-unit bulk purchasing costs over time.

Chart type: Line chart with a toggle to a grouped bar chart view.

Purpose: Show how the 2025-2026 RAM shortage moved the price of a representative single-board computer (the Pi 5, 8GB configuration) over six quarters, and how bulk purchasing discounts partially offset the increase.

X-axis: Quarter (2025-Q1, 2025-Q2, 2025-Q3, 2025-Q4, 2026-Q1, 2026-Q2)

Y-axis: Approximate price in US dollars per unit (range 50-150)

Data series:

  1. Single-unit price (raspberry #C2185B line): 65, 68, 80, 95, 125, 135
  2. Bulk price per unit, 20+ units (circuit green #2E7D32 line): 60, 63, 74, 88, 115, 124

Interactive elements: hovering any data point shows an exact dollar value and quarter in a tooltip. A createCheckbox()-style toggle switches between the line-chart view and a grouped bar view of the same data for students who find bars easier to compare directly. A dropdown lets the student pick which board's price history to display (Pi 5 8GB, Pi 500+), swapping the underlying dataset and redrawing.

Title: "Component Price Trends During the 2025-2026 RAM Shortage"

Annotation: a shaded vertical band across 2025-Q4 through 2026-Q1 labeled "Shortage peak" to draw attention to the steepest part of the increase, plus a dashed forward-projection segment past 2026-Q2 labeled "Analysts expect elevated prices to persist ~2-3 more years" to visually connect the historical trend to the forward-looking note in the chapter text.

Implementation: Chart.js line chart with a dataset-swap function triggered by the dropdown's onchange handler; canvas responsive via Chart.js's built-in responsive: true and maintainAspectRatio: false options inside a resizable container div.

Berry's Gentle Warning

Berry warning Never trust a price you read in an old blog post, video, or — yes — an older printing of a book like this one. Prices in this space move fast, especially during a shortage. Always check current pricing before you finalize a classroom order.

A Framework for Deciding

With all of that context in place, you're ready for the actual decision. A product decision framework is a structured set of questions, applied in order, that narrows a large set of options down to the one that best fits a specific goal — in this case, turning "which Raspberry Pi board should I buy?" into a short, repeatable checklist instead of a guess. This book's framework asks four questions, in this order:

  1. What does the project need to do? A project that only reads a sensor and blinks a light rarely needs an operating system — reach for a Pico-family board. A project that needs a camera, real-time AI inference, or a full desktop environment needs a single board computer.
  2. What's the price tier, and does it fit the budget? Check current pricing, not last year's — remember the RAM shortage lesson above.
  3. Is the hardware compatible with what you already own? Hardware compatibility is whether a new component, accessory, or piece of code will work correctly with a board's specific pins, connectors, voltage levels, and software ecosystem. A breadboard shield built for a Pico's pin layout won't necessarily fit a Pi 5, and MicroPython code written for an RP2040 chip sometimes needs small adjustments to run on an RP2350-based Pico 2.
  4. Is the board well documented? Vendor documentation is the official technical reference material a manufacturer publishes for a product — pinout diagrams, datasheets, and getting-started guides. A board with thin or outdated vendor documentation costs you extra time troubleshooting later, even if it was cheaper up front.

Berry's Tip

Berry sharing a tip Question four trips people up the most. Before you buy anything, actually open the manufacturer's documentation page and see if it has a clear pinout diagram and a getting-started example. If you can't find one in five minutes, that's a real warning sign, not a minor inconvenience.

Let's put this framework to work as an interactive tool rather than just a checklist to read.

Diagram: Product Decision Framework Wizard

Run the Product Decision Framework Wizard MicroSim fullscreen

Product Decision Framework Wizard (MicroSim)

Type: microsim sim-id: product-decision-framework-wizard
Library: p5.js
Status: Specified

Learning objective: Students will apply (Bloom L3: Apply) the four-question product decision framework to recommend a Raspberry Pi board for a given project scenario and budget.

Canvas: 700x460px, responsive — recompute question-panel width from windowWidth inside windowResized().

Data Visibility Requirements: Stage 1: Show the current question text and its answer options as large clickable buttons. Stage 2: After each answer, show a running "narrowed-down list" of remaining candidate boards along the bottom of the canvas, with eliminated boards shown grayed out and crossed through rather than removed. Stage 3: After all four questions, show the single recommended board with a one-sentence justification referencing the specific answers given.

Controls: four createButton() groups, one per framework question, revealed one at a time (question 2 only appears after question 1 is answered, and so on). A createButton() labeled "Start Over" resets all answers and restores the full five-board list.

Interaction: clicking an answer button advances to the next question and updates the narrowed-down board list beneath the question panel in real time, so students can watch candidates get eliminated as they answer. The final recommendation panel includes a "Why?" button that re-displays each of the four answers next to the framework question it addressed.

Instructional Rationale: A step-through wizard with visible candidate elimination is appropriate for an Apply-level objective because it lets students see cause and effect between each framework question and the shrinking set of viable boards, rather than just receiving a final answer with no visible reasoning.

Implementation: p5.js. Represent the five boards as an array of objects with boolean-eligibility flags per question branch; each answer button click sets flags and filters the displayed list. Use createButton() for all controls per project convention, positioned with .position() relative to canvas coordinates, and repositioned inside windowResized().

Buying for a Classroom

Everything so far applies whether you're buying one board for yourself or forty for a classroom, but bulk buying introduces its own considerations. A classroom budget is the total amount of money a teacher, program, or school has available to spend on hardware for a group of students, usually fixed well in advance and rarely adjustable mid-year. Bulk purchasing, defined earlier, is the main lever educators pull to stretch a classroom budget further, but it comes with tradeoffs worth naming plainly.

  • Bulk orders often unlock a lower price per unit, but usually require ordering all at once, which is risky during a component shortage when prices are still moving.
  • Buying every student the exact same board (rather than a mix) simplifies troubleshooting, since every wiring diagram and every line of example code applies to every student's setup identically.
  • A slightly more expensive board with strong vendor documentation can save an educator hours of support time across a class of thirty, which is a cost total cost of ownership captures but the sticker price does not.
  • Ordering a few spares beyond the exact headcount protects device lifespan concerns — a board damaged by a reversed wire won't stall a whole class if a spare is on hand.

Berry's Key Insight

Berry thinking Notice that every one of those four bullet points is really just the product decision framework applied at classroom scale. Nothing new to learn here — just the same four questions, asked once for thirty boards instead of one.

Bringing It Together

You now have the full map of the Raspberry Pi Foundation product line — two families, five boards, the chips that power them, and a repeatable framework for choosing between them that accounts for price, compatibility, documentation, and total cost over time. Every remaining chapter in this book assumes you can look at a project and immediately place it on this map. The next chapter puts a Pico in your hands and starts wiring it to a breadboard, where these hardware choices become real circuits with real voltage, current, and resistance running through them.

You Unlocked a Superpower!

Berry celebrating That's berry impressive — you can now walk into any project brief and know exactly which board belongs on your workbench. Budgeting and board-picking isn't the flashiest superpower, but it's the one that keeps every other project in this book on time and on budget. Let's build something — see you in Chapter 3!

See Annotated References