Discover whether the newly launched Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and its upgraded RP2350 microcontroller justify upgrading your current DIY electronics and automation setups.
Pretty and petite. The rose blossom design of these artisan-crafted sterling silver earrings add flawless floral allure to your lovely look. From Novica, in association with National Geographic.
A line-up of white topaz makes this adjustable bracelet sparkle and shine!
This rapid-touch grinder makes grinding fresh coffee beans, dry herbs, and spices a breeze. From Espressione.
When Raspberry Pi entered the microcontroller market in 2021 with the original Pico, it shifted the DIY electronics landscape. This successor arrives three years after the original Pico, which utilized the highly popular RP2040. For hobbyists, engineers, and DIY enthusiasts alike, this release sparks an important question: does the Pico 2 offer enough value to justify upgrading your existing projects, or should you stick with the tried-and-true original? In this buying guide, we will break down the structural, functional, and performance differences between these two silicon powerhouses to help you make an informed decision for your next build.
To understand the leap forward that the Pico 2 represents, we must first look at the silicon. The original Raspberry Pi Pico features the RP2040, a chip built on a 40nm process node containing dual ARM Cortex-M0+ processors running at 133MHz. It was a revelation for its time, offering low latency, excellent input/output flexibility through its Programmable I/O (PIO) blocks, and a highly accessible price point. The new RP2350 on the Pico 2, however, is manufactured on a more advanced process but features a radically upgraded processor design. It boasts dual ARM Cortex-M33 processors running at a snappy 150MHz. Furthermore, it includes a unique hardware feature: two Hazard3 RISC-V cores that can be enabled in place of the Cortex-M33 cores. This dual-architecture capability makes the Pico 2 an incredibly versatile playground for developers who want to experiment with alternative instruction sets.
The shift from Cortex-M0+ to Cortex-M33 brings substantial architectural benefits beyond a simple clock speed bump from 133MHz to 150MHz. The Cortex-M33 architecture includes a dedicated single-precision floating-point unit (FPU) and digital signal processing (DSP) instructions. On the original RP2040, floating-point operations had to be calculated in software, which significantly slowed down math-heavy applications. If you are working on real-time audio synthesis, digital filtering, sensor fusion, or lightweight machine learning models at the edge, the hardware FPU on the RP2350 will deliver a night-and-day difference in execution speed and efficiency.
RAM is often the bottleneck in complex IoT and graphics projects. The original Pico features 264KB of on-chip SRAM, which is plenty for basic automation and sensor logging but can become tight when driving high-resolution displays or complex networking stacks. The Pico 2 increases this on-chip SRAM to 520KB. Additionally, the RP2350 introduces a much more sophisticated QSPI bus interface that supports external PSRAM (Pseudo-SRAM) expansion up to 16MB. This means that if you find yourself running out of memory for frame buffers or large data tables, the Pico 2 can easily scale to meet your needs, whereas the RP2040 is fundamentally limited by its internal memory ceiling.
One of the major weaknesses of the original RP2040 was its lack of advanced hardware security, meaning that firmware could easily be dumped or modified by anyone with physical access to the flash memory chip. The RP2350 addresses this vulnerability head-on by integrating ARM TrustZone technology. This enables secure boot capabilities, hardware-enforced cryptographic acceleration, and secure storage for sensitive keys. If you are designing smart home devices, secure access controllers, or any IoT application connected to the internet, the security enhancements of the Pico 2 make it the only logical choice.
One of the most beloved features of the RP2040 was its Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines, which allowed developers to emulate custom hardware interfaces like SD card readers, VGA outputs, or custom LED protocols without taxing the main CPU cores. The RP2350 builds upon this legacy by expanding the PIO system. It features three PIO blocks with a total of twelve state machines, compared to the RP2040's two blocks and eight state machines. This 50% increase in PIO capacity means you can run even more complex peripheral setups simultaneously, unlocking new possibilities for retrocomputing emulation, advanced robotics, and high-speed data acquisition.
Raspberry Pi has always prioritized the maker community, and this is highly evident in the physical layout of the Pico 2. The board retains the exact same DIP-style footprint as the original Pico, with the same pinouts for the primary GPIO functions. This backwards compatibility ensures that the majority of existing carrier boards, add-on shims, and custom PCBs designed for the original Pico will work seamlessly with the Pico 2. However, it is worth noting that some advanced features of the RP2350, such as its higher GPIO count on larger chip packages, are only fully accessible on custom boards utilizing the raw chip, but the standard Pico 2 board remains a drop-in replacement for almost all classic Pico projects.
Despite the clear technical superiority of the RP2350, the original RP2040-based Pico is far from obsolete. For simple DIY projects like basic temperature monitors, simple macro pads, addressable LED controllers, or automated plant watering systems, the processing power of the RP2040 is already more than sufficient. Additionally, because the RP2040 has been on the market for several years, it has an incredibly vast ecosystem of tutorials, libraries, and community forum solutions. If you are a beginner looking to learn the ropes of MicroPython or C/C++ embedded development, starting with the cheaper, ultra-accessible original Pico remains a highly practical and cost-effective choice.
You should choose the Pico 2 and its RP2350 chip if your project falls into any of the following categories:
Choosing between these two boards ultimately comes down to your project requirements and budget. The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is not just an incremental refresh; it is a comprehensive overhaul that addresses almost every limitation of the original hardware while maintaining an incredibly low price. While the classic RP2040 will continue to serve as the entry-level workhorse of the hobbyist world, the RP2350 establishes a new gold standard for performance, security, and peripheral flexibility in DIY electronics. Whether you are building a simple home sensor or a highly secure edge-computing node, understanding the strengths of each board will ensure your next project is built on the perfect foundation.
