Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is faster and backward-compatible, still only $5

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 today, a 21mm x 51mm hobbyist chip built on the in-house RP2350, representing the second generation of this chip type.

Compared to the first Raspberry Pi Pico — which came out in 2021 and was built on RP2040 — this one has an increased clock rate (from 133MHz to 150MHz) with more powerful Arm cores, double the flash memory (from 2MB to 4MB), new security features, and upgraded interfaces.

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This new microcontroller board promises a significant increase in performance and more versatility for whatever ideas and projects you can dream up. At the same time, the hardware should be backward-compatible with older Pico components.

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 — which is programmable using C, C++, and Python — is available in various housing options and is intended for DIY projects that are too big or too powerful for a Raspberry Pi to handle.

But the most shocking thing about this release? The new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 has an astonishingly low price of just $5.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 technical details

Here’s a quick rundown of all the specs and features you can expect on this latest generation of this popular microcontroller board:

• Dual Arm Cortex-M33 and dual Hazard-3 processors @ 150MHz
• 520KB on-chip SRAM
• Software/hardware compatibility with Raspberry Pi Pico
• Drag-and-drop programming via mass storage over USB
• Module enables direct soldering on carrier boards
• 2 × UART
• 2 × SPI controllers
• 2 × I2C controllers
• 24 × PWM channels
• 4 × ADC channels
• 1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support
• 12 × PIO state machines
• Open-source C/C++ SDK, MicroPython support
• Operating temperatures: -20°C to +85°C
• Supported input voltage: 1.8 to 5.5V DC

Robust security features include:

• Optional boot signing, enforced by on-chip mask ROM, with key fingerprint in OTP
• Protected OTP storage for optional boot decryption key
• Global bus filtering based on Arm or RISC-V security/privilege levels
• Peripherals, GPIOs, and DMA channels individually assignable to security domains
• Hardware mitigations for fault injection attacks
• Hardware SHA-256 accelerator

Pre-order the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

Detailed documentation and initial pre-order options can be found on this page. As of this writing, authorized US retailers include SparkFun, Adafruit, CanaKit, and PiShop. All are selling the board for $5. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 isn’t yet available on Amazon.

According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, almost four million Pico chips have been sold so far (some in the wireless Pico W version).

Further reading: Practical Raspberry Pi projects anyone can do

Author: Hans-Christian Dirscherl, Managing Editor, PC-WELT