The Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller is a compact, powerful board with 26 general-purpose input/output pins. It can be programmed in Python and uses a 3.3V logic level (as opposed to the Arduino Uno, for instance, which uses a 5V logic level). It plugs straight into a computer via a USB B micro port, and can appear as a USB storage device to the computer which makes uploading Python programs to it as simple as copying the appropriate file right onto the drive.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is driven by a RP2040 chip at its core, which runs quickly (133MHz) and has quite a bit of memory available (2MB of Flash memory). Owing to these impressive stats and lots of design and architectural decisions, the board is capable of fairly high-level performance, doing things such as audio synthesis which would be difficult or impossible on an Arduino Uno.