Raspberry Pi Pico 2

Overview

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is the successor to the original Pico, built on Raspberry Pi's second-generation RP2350 microcontroller. Where the original Pico ran dual Cortex-M0+ cores at 133MHz, the Pico 2 upgrades to dual ARM Cortex-M33 cores at 150MHz — and uniquely allows the developer to boot into dual RISC-V Hazard3 mode instead, making it the first commercially available board to offer a switchable dual-ISA architecture. This flexibility is particularly interesting for bare-metal and RTOS developers exploring RISC-V.

The hardware delivers exactly double the memory of the original Pico: 520KB of on-chip SRAM (up from 264KB) and 4MB of QSPI flash (up from 2MB). The same 26 multi-purpose GPIO pins are broken out, four of which are usable as 12-bit ADC inputs. Two UARTs, two SPI controllers, two I2C buses, 24 PWM channels, and 12 PIO state machines (up from 8 on RP2040) are available for peripheral interfacing. Power input is 1.8–5.5V, and the USB 1.1 controller supports both host and device mode.

Unlike the Pico 2W, the Pico 2 has no wireless radio, keeping the BOM cost low for applications that don't require WiFi or Bluetooth. New security features in the RP2350 include hardware AES, SHA-256 accelerator, an on-chip True Random Number Generator, and support for a secure boot chain — features absent from RP2040. Note: the A2 silicon revision carries the E9 erratum affecting certain GPIO pull-down configurations with PIO state machines.

The Pico 2 is fully supported by the official Raspberry Pi Pico SDK, MicroPython, and CircuitPython. It is pin-compatible with the original Pico, allowing most existing Pico projects to run without hardware changes. The "with header" variant ships with pre-soldered 2.54mm pin headers, making it breadboard-ready out of the box.