Raspberry Pi Pico 2 – finally a successor to the original $5 microcontroller gets launched – here’s what we know

It’s been three and a half years since Raspberry Pi first launched the Pico – a $4 microcontroller that was going up directly against the Arduinos of this world. We then got the Pico W which included WiFi for another $4 and there is one of those still sitting on my desk in front of me.

Now, fast-forward to today and the launch of the Pico 2 with a price point of just $5. The Pico 2 is the first Pi to be powered by a RISC-V-based CPU. The Pico 2 is built on the new RP2350 – a new high-performance, secure microcontroller designed by Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi describes the Pico 2 as follows, “With a higher core clock speed, twice the memory, more powerful Arm cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature uplift, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Pico series.”

As with the original Raspberry Pi Pico there is no WiFi connectivity built into the Pico 2 and it’s 21x55mm form factor. For that, we will have to wait until the launch of the Pi Pico W 2 which is slated for later this year.

With the issues Raspberry Pi has faced with the chip shortage over the last few years, it is great to see the arrival of the Pico 2 and we are looking forward to getting our hands on it properly.

RP2350 Features

• Two 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores, with floating point and DSP support
• 520KB of on-chip SRAM in ten concurrently accessible banks
• A comprehensive security architecture, built around Arm TrustZone for Cortex-M, and including:
  Signed boot support
• 8KB of on-chip antifuse one-time-programmable (OTP) memory
• SHA-256 acceleration
• A hardware true random number generator (TRNG)
• An on-chip switch-mode power supply and low-quiescent-current LDO
• Twelve upgraded PIO state machines
• A new HSTX peripheral for high-speed data transmission
• Support for external QSPI PSRAM

The Pico 2 is on sale now priced at $5 from Raspberry Pi although it looks as though you can only pre-order it with units expected to ship around 19th August.

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