Pimoroni has released the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2W based on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip, the same chip featured in Raspberry Pi Pico 2 which was released a few weeks ago. It fulfills many shortcomings of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. The ‘W’ in its name signifies wireless capabilities of the new board. The notable features are a USB-C port for power and programming, easy connectors for I2C and SPI, an onboard reset button, and 2.4 GHz wireless and Bluetooth connectivity.
The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2W is powered by the RP2350B chip which contains Dual Arm Cortex M33. 16MB of QSPI flash and 8MB of PSRAM makes it capable of running resource intensive programs. External PSRAM can be added if required. WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity is facilitated by the Raspberry Pi RM2 module which houses the Infineon CYW43439 chip, the same chip that gives wireless capabilities to Raspberry Pi Pico W.
Its pinout consists of 40 pins with castellated solder pads, 20 on each side. Pin headers can be easily soldered to these pins for breadboard prototyping.
Features of Pimoroni Pico 2W:
- SoC: Raspberry Pi RP2350B Dual Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 150MHz
- 520KB of on-chip SRAM and 8MB of PSRAM
- 16MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
- 48 GPIO pins
- Peripherals-
- 8 x 12-bit ADC
- 2 × UART
- 2 × SPI controllers
- 2 × I2C controllers
- 24 × PWM channels
- 12 × PIO state machines
- Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for interfacing external peripherals
Apart from USB-C port, a reset button on board is another welcoming feature. Users of the Raspberry Pi Pico development board may be aware that there is no reset button. We also wrote a guide on how to reset Pi Pico in different ways. The reset button on the Pimoroni board will allow users to easily reset the board when the device fails to run code. The BOOT button which puts the device in bootloader mode can also act as a user input button (it is wires to GPIO 45).
The Pimoroni Pico 2W can be programmed using C/C++ and MicroPython. It is now retailing online for £16.80 at Pimoroni’s store. Users can also choose add ons such as USB cables, pin headers, GPIO expanders and JST-SH cables at the time of checkout. Raspberry Pi has promised that RP2350 will remain in production until at least January 2045.
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