While the Raspberry Pi Pico W has always had that Bluetooth radio sitting there in the CYW43439 chip from Infineon, software support was lacking. The Pico SDK was released early, released often, and we’re up to version 1.5.0 now.

Raspberry Pi documentation guy and Mastodon-curious prolific tweeter Alasdair Allan saw 2023 in by teasing the news on January 4th: Bluetooth support would be a milestone to be reached for the new SDK version, and this has been delivered — the GitHub commit mentions 6 new libraries for core Bluetooth functionality, as well as a few integration and HCI libraries.
 

This opens up all kinds of possibilities that had already been envisioned and can finally be realized. The Raspberry Pi Pico, measuring in at just 51 mm × 21 mm, will fit comfortably inside a wireless mouse or wireless keyboard project, or could add Bluetooth support to an old gadget such as a radio-controlled car or a robot arm, or we could hook the Pico up to an HDMI/DVI or even an old VGA display and interface it with a heart-rate monitor for nice graphics to inspire those intense workouts, in a way only the bigger Raspberry Pi siblings could do before!
 
Raspberry Pi Pico and Polar H10 Heart Rate Monitor
We all know the workout didn’t happen if there’s no data to back it up.
Of course, with ESP32-based boards being not that much more expensive, it comes down to what development environment you prefer. The Pico SDK is C-based, so don’t expect to dive in right away with CircuitPython / MicroPython Bluetooth development, but we can expect that down the road, so get that imagination flowing if you’re a Python person.

Now that the moat to King Harald’s castle has been opened, we just know that you’re going to do some fascinating things with Bluetooth. Please let us know the moment you come up with anything practical, cool (or just crazy) to do with it.