Designfax weekly eMagazine

Subscribe Today!

Archives

View Archives

Partners

Manufacturing Center
Product Spotlight

Modern Applications News
Metalworking Ideas For
Today's Job Shops

Tooling and Production
Strategies for large
metalworking plants

Raspberry Pi Pico 2: Microcontroller board with 2x flash memory

Raspberry Pi's Pico low-cost, high-performance microcontroller board with flexible digital interfaces is now being offered as a full second-generation product, complete with twice the on-board flash memory. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 retains the footprint of the original Pico, while benefiting from the performance uplift delivered by the brand-new RP2350 microcontroller.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2. [Credit: Image courtesy Raspberry Pi]

 

 

When compared to its very popular $4 predecessor, the RP2040 microcontroller launched in 2021, RP2350 offers a 150-MHz system clock (versus 133 MHz), dual Arm Cortex-M33 cores (versus dual Arm Cortex-M0+), dual Hazard3 RISC-V cores, 520-KB SRAM (versus 264 KB), 8-KB on-chip antifuse OTP storage, a comprehensive security model based on Arm TrustZone for Cortex-M, and greatly improved power efficiency.

The $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 pairs RP2350 with 4 MB of on-board flash memory (versus 2 MB on Raspberry Pi Pico) for code and data storage.

"The enhanced features deliver a real step-change compared with the original Pico," said Simon Wade, senior global product manager, Single Board Computing, at Newark, an approved U.S. reseller. "With the launch of this innovative product, it is an exciting time for enthusiasts across the globe."

For users who want wireless connectivity, the $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W is still available.

Key security features of Pico 2 RP2350 include: OTP for boot configuration and key storage, support in ROM for stage 2 bootloader authentication using a public key fingerprint in OTP, and system infrastructure support for Arm TrustZone for Cortex-M.

VIDEO: Introducing Raspberry Pi Pico 2, the new $5 microcontroller board. [Credit: Raspberry Pi]

The RP2350 peripheral set comprises: 2 UARTs, 2 SPI controllers, 2 I2C controllers, 24 PWM channels, a USB 1.1 controller and PHY with host and device support, and 12 PIO state machines. An enhanced QSPI interface provides a double-banked cache for higher hit bandwidth and supports flash and PSRAM, burst transfers, odd clock divisors, and address translation.

As with the roll-out of its predecessor RP2040, a number of third-party products developed specifically in anticipation of the introduction of the RP2350 are also being introduced.

See the full Pico 2 release from Raspberry Pi here for even more info. This page also includes a list of development partners and products. Very useful!

Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton said, "The development of Pico 2 and RP2350 has been an epic, multi-year effort: It is comfortably the second-largest engineering program we've undertaken, behind only Raspberry Pi 5. Its success is a testament to the incredible talents of the team here, and to the world-class partners who have joined us on the journey."

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is now available to pre-order from Newark in North America.

Please note Raspberry Pi has a list of approved U.S. resellers here. Scroll down to end of page. If you buy an early unit on ebay or the like instead, you will probably pay a hefty premium. Production is still ramping up, so you likely will not be able to get your hands on Pico 2 immediately.

Sources: Newark, Raspberry Pi

Published August 2024

Rate this article