I guess the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect will be the answer, wifi and BT included "coming soon".
This is exactly the kind of board I was looking for!
- 18 PWM ports! (Not just 5, like on Arduino Nano) >> ideal for dimmers and motors.
- 2 cores
- built-in temperature sensor
- easy Plug&Play "mass storage" firmware upload
- USB connection (well shielded, easy and cheap to expand / multiply)
etc.
The only problem (yet?) :
It has no ready-to-use firmware, that would make these devices plug&play extensions of an RPi.
How cool would it be to:
- plug one of those into a PC
- set parameters by simply editing a config file on it, like :
name='pico17'password_SHA256='A7259FCC...'I2C_bus_number=27
- plug into an RPi with a 3-5m cable
- and you could directly use those ports like it would be the RPi's built-in one.
... or at least via serial-MQTT.
An interesting thing about this Pi Pico is the language they want to promote besides C: MicroPython.
Sure C is still much better than MicroPython in terms of speed, memory usage and great control over hardware. But MicroPython is very easy to use and Python is the fastest growing language.
I am sure that Pi foundation can add WiFi and bluetooth option with the next release.
In terms of low power, neither Pi Pico or ESP32 can touch BLE and LoRa 
BLE and LoRa are in their own league.
Not sure that Python is the fastest growing language. But unfortunately, MicroPython has been in rather a horrid state for years now. So lets hope that the Pi foundation can actually get some investment going on it.
It fractured a while back and so is nowhere near as good as it should be. Bit like what happened to Node.js some years back - but that had more investment coming in which kept both fragments going until they saw sense and re-combined.
Micropython hasn't kept up with changes because of this.
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That's why I moved to Adafruits CircuitPython, every sensor they offer has driver support. And CircuitPython supports the Pico too.
Interesting. I watched a video about Pi Pico with Micro Python and it is very easy to use. But the support and driver might be very limited as you said. With Pi Pico, it might change and get better.
I just looked into Micro Python and it was written in C actually, so it should be very hardware efficient. I will take a look at circuit Python too. Adafruit is great for makers and I love their work.
As to myself, I stick to C for hardware interface, which gives almost the best performance and control (only behind assembly language) with tons of drivers available
Circuit Python does indeed get more investment but mainly from Adafruit. That might be fine but they are naturally focused on their own products (which may be nice but I find them too expensive).
It really needs the MicroPython community to stop messing about and combine forces.
I agree. While I would naturally prefer Python over C/C++ since I really dislike C-based languages, I keep going back to it rapidly because I keep missing important libraries in MicroPython.
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