Their partners already have tons of alternative boards ready to go, including a few which are drop-in replacements for the Pico, if you don't mind spending a bit more for USB-C:
The problem is most of the boards from partners are specialized with different hardware add-ons and have a significant markup at about 10 USD a board, which makes it harder to justify buying a handful of boards to tinker with. It's quite unfortunate.
No, these are microcontrollers. They're the thing you'd put inside a device that needs a tiny bit of smarts, like Raspberry Pi's debug probe[0]. The case I have for my RPi5[1] uses an rp2040 to run the thermal management logic.
Oh, I was trying to understand why cheap chiniseum USB-C-powered products off Amazon were only charging from a cheap USB-A brick and not from my quality USB C chargers.
Ugh, that one was killing me the other day. I went through 3 different cables before I found a hardware designer on the company's discord who could explain the issue.
I suspect the microUSB would actually fail in OTG mode for the same reasons in that case though? It's the same thing in terms of needing extra resistors.
Probably so they can say that it's a drop-in upgrade over the Pico 1. It's not a drop-in upgrade if you have to redesign your project's case to use it.
No, it just needs 2 extra resistors to work properly, but will work as-is if you use USB-A to USB-C cables and as long as you don't pull more power than available by default (i.e. you can request 3A @ 5V just by adding two resistors, but without it you're limited to USB's defaults)
In the past, when usb-c just got introduced micro usb ports for significantly cheaper than usb-c, so it made some sense. Today, it makes no sense.
You can't request 3A via resistors and you don't need to. You can advertise being able to source 3A via resistors. The sink does not advertise how much power it draws (unless it speaks PD), sink's responsibility is to check for what the source advertises (either via resistors or PD) before attempting to draw more power than USB default if you want to be compliant, which boils down to a simple comparator/ADC reading.
Simple sinks just use two 5.1k resistors for pull-downs, no matter how much power they want to draw - and they always need these resistors (two for receptacles, one for plugs), otherwise they won't work with USB-C sources at all.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/powered-by/product-...