Best Raspberry Pi Pico Projects and Kits for 2026

The Raspberry Pi Pico sits in the awkward middle ground where most makers don’t think to look. An Arduino UNO feels too slow when you want Wi-Fi and a color display, a Raspberry Pi 5 feels absurd when all you want is to scan a keyboard matrix and light up some LEDs. The Pico solves that exact problem for around $5 to $7, and after the RP2350 launch and the Pico 2 W shipping in volume, the 2026 lineup is the strongest it’s ever been.

This guide is for someone who already knows what a breadboard is and wants to know which Pico-family board to grab next, plus what to actually build with it. If you’re brand new to all of this, our best Raspberry Pi starter kits for 2026 guide covers the full-fat Pi 4, Pi 5, and Pi Zero side of the family first.

TL;DR: our picks at a glance

Use case	Board	Approx. price	Why
Best overall in 2026	Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W	$7	Dual Cortex-M33 at 150 MHz, 520 KB SRAM, 4 MB flash, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.2. The new default.
Best with headers presoldered	Raspberry Pi Pico W (H)	$6 to $8	Original RP2040, breadboard-ready out of the bag. Buy when you need three of them by tomorrow.
Best display badge	Pimoroni Tufty 2040	$26	2.4” 320x240 IPS color, five buttons, lanyard slot, light sensor. Wearable conference badge done.
Best robotics starter	Cytron Maker Pi RP2040	$10	Dual H-bridge motor driver, 4 servo headers, 7 Grove ports. The robot board for under a tenner.
Best e-ink display	Pimoroni Inky Frame 7.3”	$200	800x480 Spectra 6-color e-paper, Pico 2 W onboard, battery connector. Desk dashboard solved.
Best custom keyboard MCU	Adafruit KB2040	$9	Pro Micro footprint, 8 MB flash, 20 GPIO, USB-C. Drop-in replacement for Pro Micro in any QMK build.
Best graphical kit for kids	Pimoroni Pico Display Pack	$18 + $5 Pico	1.14” color LCD, four buttons, plug-and-play with MicroPython examples.
Best retro video output	Pimoroni PicoVision	$40	Dual RP2040 chips, one runs the program, one drives DVI. 720p over HDMI from a $40 board.

If you only buy one thing on this list, buy the Pico 2 W. Everything else is a variation on that theme.

Why we like the Pi Pico ecosystem in 2026

We’ve been deep in the RP2040 world since the original Pico launched in early 2021, and the gap between Pico-family boards and the rest of the microcontroller market keeps widening. The reason is the PIO blocks: each Pico has programmable I/O state machines that let you bit-bang protocols faster than software bitbanging on any other hobbyist chip. WS2812 LEDs, DVI output, custom serial buses, parallel camera capture: things that need a dedicated peripheral on an STM32 just work on the Pico because PIO is general enough to fake any of them.

The RP2350 doubled down on that. You get 12 PIO state machines instead of 8, 520 KB of SRAM instead of 264 KB, and a security architecture with Arm TrustZone, signed boot, and 8 KB of antifuse OTP for key storage. Most hobbyists will never touch the security side. The extra RAM and PIO matter every day.

The other half of the story is the third-party ecosystem. Pimoroni, Adafruit, Cytron, SparkFun, Seeed, and Waveshare have all built boards around the RP2040 and now the RP2350. The MicroPython port is first-class, CircuitPython supports nearly every board, and the official Pico C SDK is one of the cleanest hobbyist toolchains we’ve used. That breadth is what makes the Pico ecosystem feel different from buying a one-off oddball board.

Our contrarian take: the Pi Pico is the only microcontroller most makers need. The Arduino UNO R4 WiFi is fine, the ESP32 is fine, the STM32 Nucleo is fine, but if you started over today, you could spend the next three years exclusively on RP2040 and RP2350 boards and never run into a wall you couldn’t climb. The Pico is good enough that fragmenting your toolchain is the bigger cost.

Best overall: Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W

Price: $7. Chip: RP2350. Cores: dual Cortex-M33 at 150 MHz. RAM: 520 KB. Flash: 4 MB. Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz 802.11n. Bluetooth: 5.2.

The Pico 2 W is the board to buy in 2026 unless you have a specific reason not to. It keeps the original 51 mm by 21 mm DIP-style footprint with castellated edges, so it drops into any breadboard or any PCB designed for the original Pico. It keeps the 26 GPIO pins, the three ADC channels, and the BOOTSEL button on top. What changes is everything inside.

The dual Cortex-M33 cores at 150 MHz are roughly 30% faster per core than the M0+ at 133 MHz in the original, and they have an actual FPU and DSP extensions. RAM doubled from 264 KB to 520 KB. Onboard QSPI flash doubled from 2 MB to 4 MB. The PIO blocks went from two to three, with 12 state machines total. The Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip is the same one that’s been in the Pico W since 2022, which is good news because the driver stack is rock-solid by now.

What it costs you: the Pico 2 W uses micro-USB, not USB-C. We’d have paid $2 more for USB-C. The buck-boost SMPS now accepts 1.8 V to 5.5 V on VSYS, which means a single lithium cell works without level conversion, but the lack of an onboard battery connector means you’re still adding a JST or screw terminal.

Buy this if: you’re starting any new Pico project in 2026. Two of these in a drawer is a reasonable minimum for any hobbyist.

Best with presoldered headers: Raspberry Pi Pico W (H)

Price: $6 to $8. Chip: RP2040. Cores: dual Cortex-M0+ at 133 MHz. RAM: 264 KB. Flash: 2 MB.

The “H” suffix means headers are already soldered on. For someone who hasn’t bought a soldering iron yet, or who needs three boards by tomorrow morning for a workshop, this is non-negotiable. Our best soldering kits for beginners 2026 guide covers what to grab if you’re going to do this often, but for occasional users, paying the $1 premium for a presoldered Pico W is correct.

We’re listing the original Pico W rather than waiting for a Pico 2 W (H) variant because the W (H) is what’s actually in stock at every distributor in 2026. The original RP2040 still beats the Arduino UNO R4 on every spec that matters, and the price gap of $1 to $2 versus the Pico 2 means it’s still the cost-optimized pick when you’re buying ten of them for a class.

Buy this if: you hate soldering, or you’re stocking a classroom or makerspace, or you’re prototyping with breadboards constantly and want pin labels you can read.

Best display badge: Pimoroni Tufty 2040

Price: $26. Chip: RP2040. Display: 2.4” 320x240 IPS color LCD. Buttons: 5. Extras: lanyard slot, light sensor, JST battery connector.

The Tufty is what a microcontroller badge should be. It’s a credit-card-sized PCB with a bright color screen on the front, five tactile buttons along the bottom, and the RP2040 on the back next to a battery connector and a USB-C port. The light-sensing phototransistor auto-dims the backlight, which matters when you’re wearing it at a conference and don’t want to blind people.

The display is driven by the RP2040 directly, no separate framebuffer chip. Total power draw is around 100 mA at full brightness with the screen running. On a 2000 mAh lithium pack you’ll get most of a day, which is enough for a conference badge but not enough for an always-on display.

Pimoroni’s MicroPython firmware ships with a PicoGraphics library that handles fonts, JPEG decoding, and dithered images out of the box. The example code includes a name badge, a Hacker News reader over Wi-Fi (with the Pico W version), and a Pomodoro timer. Realistically you’ll be writing your own badge in a weekend.

Buy this if: you’re going to a hardware conference and want a badge that says something, or you want a hackable color display with buttons in one purchase.

Best robotics starter: Cytron Maker Pi RP2040

Price: $10. Chip: RP2040. Motor driver: dual H-bridge, 1A per channel. Servo headers: 4. Grove I/O: 7. Audio: piezo buzzer.

For under $10, Cytron crammed a Pico-class microcontroller, a motor driver capable of running two small DC motors, four servo headers, seven Grove ports, and a piezo into one board. There’s no reason this should cost what it costs. If you’re building a robot for a kid or for yourself, this is the starting point.

The dual H-bridge handles two 1A-per-channel DC motors directly: no separate motor shield, no MOSFET wiring. The servo headers run off a separate VIN rail so you can power them from a different source than the logic. The Grove ports cover I2C, UART, analog, and digital. We’d want USB-C instead of micro-USB, and the motor driver is fine for small geared DC motors but not for anything pulling more than 1A, where you’d want a beefier external driver.

This pairs well with our best STEM and robotics kits for kids coverage if you’re shopping for a complete project rather than a bare board.

Buy this if: you want to build a line-following robot, a sumo bot, or a desktop pan-tilt rig without wiring a motor driver shield separately.

Best e-ink display: Pimoroni Inky Frame 7.3”

Price: $200. Chip: Pico 2 W onboard (RP2350). Display: 800x480 E Ink Spectra 6, six colors. Refresh: ~40 seconds. Extras: 5 buttons with LEDs, microSD slot, Qw/ST ports, battery connector, metal legs.

The Inky Frame is one of the few hobbyist boards we recommend at this price because it ships as a complete, usable thing on day one. It’s a 7.3-inch six-color e-paper display with a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W soldered to the back, a battery connector, metal legs so it stands on a desk, and five front-mounted buttons that double as wakeup triggers. The newer revision uses the RP2350 chip, which roughly doubles MicroPython performance and runs floating-point math up to 20x faster in C compared to the previous RP2040-based version.

The refresh time is around 40 seconds, which sounds like a lot until you remember the display draws essentially zero power between refreshes. Run it on a battery, wake it once an hour to pull a weather forecast or a Last.fm scrobble or a calendar event, and the battery lasts months.

Pimoroni’s MicroPython examples cover a weather dashboard, a stock ticker, a photo frame that pulls from a microSD card, and a stylized art display that re-dithers JPEGs into the Spectra 6 palette. The Qw/ST connectors mean you can plug a temperature or air quality sensor in without soldering.

Buy this if: you want a desk dashboard that updates a few times an hour and lasts on battery, or you want a programmable photo frame that doesn’t look like a tablet.

Best for custom keyboards: Adafruit KB2040

Price: $9. Chip: RP2040. Form factor: Sprite-Pro Micro pinout. Flash: 8 MB. GPIO: 20. Connector: USB-C. Extras: STEMMA QT port, RGB NeoPixel.

The KB2040 is what you reach for when you’re building a custom mechanical keyboard. It mimics the Pro Micro footprint that’s been the keyboard hobby standard for a decade, but it gives you an RP2040 instead of the ATmega32U4, 8 MB of flash instead of 32 KB, USB-C instead of micro-USB, and 20 GPIO that can address a 5x5 key matrix without an IO expander.

QMK and KMK both target the RP2040, so the firmware story is solved. The 8 MB of flash means you can store macros, custom fonts for OLEDs, RGB LED animation tables, and Vial keymap data without hitting the wall the way you do on AVR. STEMMA QT lets you bolt on a rotary encoder breakout or an OLED without soldering.

If you’re building a full keyboard rather than just the controller, our best mechanical keyboard kits for 2026 covers complete kits where the KB2040 sometimes shows up as the included MCU.

Buy this if: you’re building a custom split keyboard, a macropad with rotary encoders, or a numpad that needs RGB. Anywhere a Pro Micro would have gone, this goes instead at a similar price.

Best graphical kit for absolute beginners: Pimoroni Pico Display Pack

Price: $18 for the display, $5 for a Pico. Display: 1.14” 240x135 color LCD. Buttons: 4. Connector: clips onto Pico headers.

If you want one thing to put a Pico in someone’s hands and have them write a working app in an hour, this is it. The Display Pack is a small color LCD with four front-mounted buttons that clips directly onto a Pico’s headers, no soldering required if your Pico has the H suffix. The MicroPython examples include a clock, a battery monitor, a sensor readout for a BME280, and a simple Pomodoro timer.

We pair this with a Pico W (H) and a $3 BME280 breakout from Adafruit to get a weekend weather station with a screen. That’s a sub-$30 project that ends with someone showing off their thing.

Buy this if: you’re gifting a Pico to someone who needs a screen to feel motivated, or you’re prototyping a UI and don’t want to mess with an HDMI display.

Best retro video output: Pimoroni PicoVision

Price: $40. Chips: two RP2040s, one for logic, one for video. Output: HDMI/DVI up to 720p. Audio: I2S, line out. Storage: microSD.

The PicoVision is a niche but delightful board. It uses two RP2040 chips in parallel: one runs your program, the other dedicates its PIO state machines to bit-banging a DVI signal over an HDMI connector at up to 720p. The video coprocessor architecture means your program isn’t fighting the display for cycles, which is the usual problem with single-chip DVI output.

This is the closest thing to a 1980s-style home computer you can build from a $40 modern board. The example code includes a fantasy console runtime, a video player, and a simple sprite-based game framework. It’s not a Raspberry Pi 5, but you weren’t asking it to be.

Buy this if: you want to build a handheld game, a retro fantasy console, or anything that needs HDMI output from a microcontroller without going to FPGA or full Linux.

Five projects worth doing this year

The board is the easy part. Knowing what to build is the harder one. Here are five Pico projects that justify the weekend.

1. Wi-Fi air quality monitor with web dashboard

Pair a Pico 2 W with a BME280 (temperature, humidity, pressure) and a PMS5003 (PM2.5 and PM10 particulates) over I2C and UART. The Pico runs a small MicroPython web server that returns JSON, and you point Home Assistant or a Grafana dashboard at it. Total parts cost is around $30. The contrarian bit: ignore every YouTube tutorial that uses MQTT. A bare JSON endpoint over HTTP is simpler, debuggable with curl, and your home network doesn’t need another broker.

2. Custom split mechanical keyboard with rotary encoders

Two KB2040 boards, one per half. KMK firmware in CircuitPython, or QMK if you want C. Add two rotary encoders for volume and zoom, an OLED on the left half showing the current layer, and per-key RGB if you want to lean into it. Budget two weekends and around $80 to $120 depending on switches and keycaps. The reason to build instead of buy: you get to put the bracket key next to the H key, where it belongs, and you’ll never go back to a normal keyboard.

3. E-ink desk dashboard with weather, calendar, and bus times

Inky Frame 7.3” with a Pico 2 W onboard. MicroPython script wakes every 15 minutes via the onboard RTC, pulls weather from Open-Meteo (free, no API key), calendar events from a public iCal feed, and bus arrival times from your transit agency’s API. The whole thing lives on your desk, draws milliwatts between refreshes, and lasts months on a 2000 mAh battery. Total cost: the price of the Inky Frame.

4. MIDI controller for music software

Pico 2 W appears as a USB MIDI class-compliant device with one MicroPython library. Wire up eight buttons, eight rotary encoders, and eight 10K potentiometers on a perfboard, map each one to a MIDI CC, and you’ve built a $40 hardware controller for Ableton, Logic, or Bitwig that costs $200+ to buy. Bonus mode: add a small OLED to show which preset you’re on. This is the project that converts the “I tried Arduino once” person into a maker.

5. Conference badge with NeoPixel animations

Tufty 2040 plus a strip of 30 WS2812 LEDs glued to the back. The Tufty’s screen shows your name and a QR code linking to your GitHub. The LEDs run an animation pattern triggered by the five front buttons: rainbow cycle, ambient color match (via the onboard light sensor), or a Game of Life simulation. Budget: $40, one Saturday, and the willingness to wear something blinky around strangers.

What we’d skip in 2026

The original Raspberry Pi Pico (non-W, no wireless) is hard to recommend now that the Pico 2 W exists at $7. If you have a reel of them, fine. Don’t buy more for new projects.

Generic Aliexpress “RP2040 boards” that aren’t from a known vendor are usually fine for the chip itself, but the support story falls apart the moment you have a question. Pay the $2 premium for a board from Pimoroni, Adafruit, SparkFun, Cytron, Seeed, or Waveshare and you get documentation, MicroPython firmware images that actually match the board, and a community where someone else has already filed your bug.

Anything sold as a “Pico clone” with a custom RP2040 variant chip that isn’t actually the RP2040 should be treated with suspicion. The real chip is cheap enough that there’s no margin to be saved by faking it, and a knockoff chip will silently break the parts of the SDK that touch PIO timing.

For more on choosing between full single-board computers and microcontrollers in general, our best Arduino starter kits for 2026 guide walks through where the AVR-based UNO still wins (cost, library breadth for absolute beginners). The honest answer in 2026 is: the Pi Pico ecosystem has caught up on every front that matters, and the price gap is gone. You can start with a Pico 2 W and never look back.

Where to buy in 2026

For US buyers, the official Raspberry Pi Pico product page lists every approved reseller. Adafruit and SparkFun stock both bare boards and the third-party variants we covered above. Pimoroni ships directly from the UK with reasonable rates, and PiShop and PiMyLifeUp are reliable US-side options. The official Pico documentation is genuinely good, which is rare in this industry. Read the getting-started PDF before you write a line of code, you’ll save yourself a confused afternoon.