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.

Related: Raspberry Pi jumps aboard the AI train

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