It's been three years since the original Pico came out, and Raspberry Pi has just announced the Pico 2. It's faster, has more memory, uses less power, and brings a whole heap of security features. In this video, we're going to get you up to speed as quickly as possible. The Pico is part of Raspberry Pi's microcontroller board series. It's not a computer that can run Linux, but a microcontroller. At the heart of the Pico 2 is the new RP2350 microcontroller, a chip designed by Raspberry Pi themselves. The 2350 follows a naming scheme, just like the RP2040 from the last Pico. The first two digits stand for the processor, so the 2040 had a dual-core M0 Plus processor, and the 2350 has an upgraded dual-core M33 processor. We'll get into that in just a bit. The next digit is the amount of volatile memory, which uses this ridiculous formula that somehow works out to be a nice number. The Pico 2 comes with 520 kilobytes of RAM, which is double that of the first Pico. The last digit is how much internal flash memory it has, which is where you store all your code and data. Like the 2040, it has none, but instead, it has it externally on the board, and it now comes with twice as much, 4 megabytes, which is a nice upgrade for those projects that deal with large files, things like audio and image-based projects. This is a really nice numbering scheme they got going on, and I hope they stick with it.

Let's take a look at their brand new processor, the ARM Cortex-M33, which comes clocked at 150MHz. The old M0 Plus was clocked at 133MHz, and your pattern recognition brain might say 150 is 13% bigger than 133, so it must only be 13% faster. But this might not be the case, as the M33 is a more advanced and more capable processor with a lot more going on under the hood. Things like a richer instruction set and dedicated computational hardware like a divide unit mean that it can achieve more with less hertz. Coremark benchmarks indicate at best it can be about twice as powerful, but it's likely something less than that for a lot of technical and nuanced reasons. As if that wasn't enough, Raspberry Pi decided to get on the hype train and also include an extra dual-core RISC-V Hazard 3 processor. What a mouthful. RISC-V is an architecture like ARM and x86, but it's an open standard and has been making waves in the hardware world and has seen promising applications in microcontrollers and even computers. That means there are four cores in this thing, two M33 cores and two RISC-V cores, and from our understanding, you can mix and match any combination of these you want, using up to two at a time.

At this point, we can only speculate the use case of these RISC-V cores. Maybe they are incredibly power-efficient, and you can choose to use two of them for your IoT weather station. Maybe they're better suited to a certain task, and you can have a RISC-V core for processing or machine learning and an M33 for IO interaction. Regardless of their uses, I think it's a nice addition, and it likely makes the Pico 2 just that little bit more versatile. I also wonder if some genius in the community is going to be able to get all four cores working at once to some extent. Like a lot of the features we're going to talk about, it makes you wonder what are the workflows for using these cores and is it too low level of a feature to use in MicroPython? I'm a bit of a C++ convert, number one MicroPython fanboy here. The other thing that Raspberry Pi is touting is that the Pico 2 will have greatly improved power efficiency. Power saving modes were one of the biggest weak points of the original Pico and made it difficult to use in anything with limited access to power, things like off-the-grid battery projects, so any improvements here are definitely welcome.

Even worse, a great deal of investigation on our forums came to the conclusion that the original Pico's low-power modes in MicroPython were borderline placebo compared to C++, so let's hope that the Pico 2 can bring some improvements here. The other biggest announcement was the wealth of security features that come with the RP2350. That new M33 processor comes with TrustZone for ARM, a feature that allows you to isolate code and data from the rest of the application, and this helps you keep things away from prying eyes. This is great for potential industry applications like locking down firmware to prevent reverse engineering and IP theft, but for us makers, it may give us a way to hide things like authentication tokens, keys, Wi-Fi credentials, and any other important private data. If I was putting an IoT device out in the field, this would probably give me a little bit of extra peace of mind. We also have a wealth of other security features like SHA-256 acceleration, fast glitch detectors, and hardware-based random number generation, and also 8 kilobytes of one-time programmable storage. Very nice.

With all these features, we again ask, what is the workflow for using these, and can we utilize them in a MicroPython or C++ environment? Alright, let's get to the negative. I think my biggest gripe with this board is that it doesn't have a USB-C connector. It's 2024, USB-C is pretty much the standard now; it may be a form factor issue, the USB-C would raise the board and make it a little bit thicker, but I think a lot of makers are very happy to pay those few extra cents for it. It also doesn't have a reset button, so we're still going to be unplugging and re-plugging power back in, but we can only hope that Pico 3 maybe fixes these issues. Speaking of, how much is all of this going to set you back? Well, not that much. It's only about 1 US dollar more than the original Pico, which was already incredibly inexpensive. The cost-saving nature of the original Pico was a big draw for makers, and it looks like the Pico 2 will keep this appeal. Outside of these features, it looks pretty much the same, which is good here because it has the same footprint as the original Pico, the same pinout, and it looks like it's going to have the same workflows, meaning that you can seamlessly swap out your Pico with a Pico 2 in your projects.

And by the way, we've got an entire beginner course on how to use the Pico if you're interested, there's a link below, it's really good. And I nearly forgot, it now comes with an increased 12 PIO state machines. PIO on the original Pico has found some really cool and often niche applications, and this is just a nice little cherry on top for that. Well, it's been three years, and the Pico 2 is shaping up to be a very nice and welcomed refresh. For all these additional features at only a very slight price increase, I think many of my projects will be using a Pico 2 from now on, but maybe if a project called for lots and lots of Picos, I might use the original one to save a buck or two here, but double the RAM, double the flash, a boost in processor performance, and a wealth of new features for not much more, it's kind of a no-brainer there. The other question you may be asking is where's the Wi-Fi? Well, there's no official announcements there, but fingers crossed we can enjoy these new features plus Wi-Fi in the future. And of course, if you want to learn how to get your hands on one, we'll have a link below to that. Also, look out for our benchmarking video where we'll be putting the Pico 2 through its paces and testing much of what we talked about here. I hope that got you up to speed. Till next time. Bye.