Calling the RP2350's PIO units "low power io cores" is quite an exaggeration. Although they are technically turing-complete with a lot of hacking, they are absolutely awful at any kind of compute. Heck, you probably don't even want to let it handle UART parity calculation!
If anything the ESP32's Ultra-Low-Power Coprocessor would be perfect for such applications - but realistically it isn't worth the effort. Compute power usage is going to be negligible compared to what is needed for wifi and rotors, and running multiple realtime tasks on a single core isn't exactly rocket science either.
If anything the ESP32's Ultra-Low-Power Coprocessor would be perfect for such applications - but realistically it isn't worth the effort. Compute power usage is going to be negligible compared to what is needed for wifi and rotors, and running multiple realtime tasks on a single core isn't exactly rocket science either.