rp2040

I mentioned in my Pi 500 review Raspberry Pi is dogfooding their own microcontroller in the new Pi 500. An RP2040 sits next to the keyboard ribbon cable connector, and interfaces it through a USB port directly into the RP1 chip:

In good news for keyboarding enthusiasts, the RP2040 seems to be flashed with the open-source QMK ('Quantum Mechanical Keyboard') Firmware. Thanks to a reader, 'M', who figured that out!

The $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was announced today, with a new chip, the RP2350. This silicon improves on almost every aspect of the RP2040:

• 3 PIOs instead of 2
• 150 MHz instead of 133 MHz base clock
• Faster Arm Cortex M33 cores and RISC-V Hazard3 cores

I've had access to pre-release hardware and good news: even though the new chip is faster and has more features, it actually uses less power than RP2040, meaning if you run one of these things off a battery, it'll last longer.

I'll talk more about power later, but first, here's the specs.

A couple weeks ago, I glanced through my ever-growing collection of Raspberry Pi RP2040-based boards—pictured above are three of the boards I've tested: a Cytron Maker Pi RP2040, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a Seeed Studio Wio RP2040.