Pico vs Pico W memory

[tonyd]

Hi all

I was trying to program a Pico W to go to a API and pick up some data to display on a Waveshare e-ink (5.83B with Pico hat). I kept running out of memory. I tried running the Waveshare test code and that also ran out of memory. On a whim, I decided to try a standard Pico and that ran the test code and my own code OK

I compared memory with freshly rebooted boards and got this

Pico

stack: 524 out of 7936
GC: total: 192064, used: 14864, free: 177200
No. of 1-blocks: 266, 2-blocks: 52, max blk sz: 64, max free sz: 11060

Pico W

stack: 556 out of 7936
GC: total: 166016, used: 11280, free: 154736
No. of 1-blocks: 211, 2-blocks: 36, max blk sz: 64, max free sz: 9658

I assume the difference is the Pico W loading up the wireless drivers. I could not find any info to confirm, does anybody know?

Thanks

Tony

[jimmo]

I assume the difference is the Pico W loading up the wireless drivers. I could not find any info to confirm, does anybody know?

Not the drivers exactly, but we reserve some space for the network stack to allocate socket and ssl buffers.

We are in the process of moving the ssl buffers over to the MicroPython heap, so this will reclaim a lot of heap memory (~20kiB) for when you're not using SSL.

[tonyd]

Jimmo
Thanks for the reply


Tony