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  • Author Author: shabaz
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 8664 views
  • Likes 10 likes
  • Comments 23 comments
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Pimoroni Pico Plus 2: A First Look at an RP2350 Board

shabaz

I wanted to try to use the new RP2530 microcontroller, but the 'normal' board, the Pi Pico 2, is out of stock for a week or two.

However, there are Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 (what an awkward name) boards, and they were available. I thought they were a drop-in replacement, but there are differences.

Main Improvements compared to Pi Pico 2

  • More storage (16 Mbyte versus 4 Mbyte)
  • More RAM (8 Mbyte vs 0.5 Mbyte),
  • More normal USB connector (USB-C versus micro USB),
  • Integrated reset button.
  • Decent silkscreen, readable from the top side, versus tiny and unreadable on the underside.
  • Five extra GPIO pins are exposed (total of 31 versus 26)

Issues / Annoyances:

  • More than twice the price (£12 vs $5)
  • Debug connector required (3-pin JST-SH, vs normal 2.54mm pin header), an extra £2.10 cost
  • Castellated pads are kind of useless, since there are parts on both sides of the board.
  • There are no 'testpads' on the underside of the board that bring out the USB connections, whereas the Pico 2 has them. It is quite a niche thing, but I mention it, because at least one person (i.e. me) makes use of those.

The photo below shows Pimoroni are using the 80-pin RP2350 chip for this board.

You can see the 3-pin debug connector (which connects to PicoProbe) on the top-right. Below it is a 4-pin connector that carries I2C, 3.3V and GND. The I2C connections are already exposed on a couple of the castellated pads, they are GPIO 4 and GPIO 5.

image

The underside contains the storage, RAM (a PSRAM chip), and an 8-pin JST-SH socket, which carries five extra GPIO (GPIO 32-36), 3.3V and the VSYS (e.g. 5V) and GND signals.

image

Here's the pinout, taken from the Pimoroni website:

image

Summary

The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 board looks great, but it is not optimal for all projects. There are benefits and disadvantages.

I will definitely find uses for the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 board, but some of its features will be overkill unless you've got a specific application in mind. If you need extra storage, you could solder a Flash memory chip onto a normal Pico or solder on a micro SD card, so there are workarounds. But it could be very convenient to have the storage and extra RAM all integrated if your project requires it. 

To make the most use out of the board, you'll need a 3-pin JST connector if you want to more easily use the C/C++ SDK or hardware debug features, and an 8-pin JST connector if you need the extra five GPIO connections.

Thanks for reading.

  • in reply to shabaz

    I will look for your writeup. Because picotool and pioasm give me pain when I test the SDK2 on windows too.

  • After many, frustrating hours, I've successfully built using CLion (I could already build from a Windows command prompt, but not from CLion directly).

    I'll write up what I did in the CLion blog  Using CLion for Easier Coding with Pi Pico and C/C++  in the next day or so.

    The root of the problem was picotool, a Windows executable, which gets built each time a Pico project is built, unless it already exists. It's a pretty stupid way of doing things, it should not be part of the project build, that seems completely unnecessary. Anyway, at least I can successfully build the .uf2 binary from CLion now.

  • The primary reason for adding 3-pin JST connector is for connecting to Picoprobe. But it should have been nice if they can expose those SWD pins as test pads atleast. ( That would have cause no harm!)

  • in reply to shabaz

    When you install GCC via the windows installer with default settings, it does - next to installing the software, two things:

    • add registry entries (they should not affect any other software)
    • change the path by adding the bin folders of the install. This may impact what executables are actually called

    What you could do is check the Windows system and user paths, store them in some text file if you want to restore later,
    and remove all path entries that point to the newly installed GCC.

    You should not need to restart windows after that, but you'd have to restart CLion

    The CLion toolchain editor should take care that you don't actually need your toolchains on the path.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    I'm confused why they made it part of the example. Would have been better for pioasm and any other tool(s) to be built as part of some post-install script for the SDK. Seems messy to me : ( it's difficult enough to troubleshoot own compiles, let alone seeing tools being built when you're trying to build an example.