Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (RP2350)

The Raspberry Pi Pico and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 are micrcontroller boards designed by Raspberry Pi. They are based around custom Integrated Circuits designed by the Raspberry Pi hardware team.

Unlike the Raspberry Pi single board computers the Pico do not normally run an operating system. Instead code is transferred to the Pico and runs directly. The code can be created in C/C++ and compiled to run directly on the hardware, or there is a MicroPython / Circuit Python interpretter which can be installed onto the Pico allowing it to be programmed using the Python programming language.

Some models are available with onboard WiFi based around ESP-32 wireless modules. Some models have pins soldered to them, or you can add your own. With pins the Pico can be plugged into a breadboard making it easy to design circuits, can be connected to existing modules, such as the Pimoroni Display Pack, or you can create your own PCB to mount them in (see my Pico LED light controller project).

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pimoroni Pico Plus 2

Raspberry Pi have released a new version of the Pico. The Pico 2. This is microcontroller based board with a new upgraded microcontroller. The microcontroller is known as RP2350 which is an upgrade from the RP2040 used on the earlier model.

There are lots of other new features and upgrades from the original RP2040, but really it’s the Hazard3 that is the main new feature, which is a RISC-V open source hardware design for the microcontroller. A great thing is that code can be compiled for either architecture and when you install it onto the board it will just boot into the appropriate core. You could in theory even run some code on a ARM core and a Risc-V core although you probably want to use both cores with the same architecture.