Adafruit Adds 8MB of Pseudo-Static RAM (PSRAM) to Its Feather RP2350 with HSTX
If 520kB of on-chip SRAM was feeling a little cramped, Adafruit's latest RP2350 development board provides the answer.
Adafruit has launched a new development board designed for those who need more RAM than is available on a standard Raspberry Pi RP2350: the Adafruit Feather RP2350 with HSTX Port and 8MB PSRAM.
"[The Adafruit Feather RP2350 is] our first RP2350 board," the company explains of the core design, "and we crammed a ton of goodies into our classic Feather format. It's an excellent starter board to go along with your [Raspberry Pi] Pico 2. This version has an [AP Memory] AP6404L 8 megabyte PSRAM [Pseudo-Static RAM] chip soldered, perfect for managing huge buffer sizes in memory!"
Adafruit unveiled the Feather RP2350 with HSTX port back in September last year as its first in-house designed built around the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller — a dual-architecture successor to the popular RP2040, packing a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores alongside free and open source RISC-V-based Hazard3 cores and 520kB of on-board SRAM.
Thinking ahead, Adafruit's board design included a footprint for an optional PSRAM module — extended memory, connected over a quad-SPI bus, which the RP2350 can address alongside its on-chip SRAM. Today's release marks the first time the footprint has been populated, delivering an additional 8MB of PSRAM along with the board's existing 8MB flash memory. The remainder of the design remains unchanged, providing access to 29 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins with eight moved to the High-Speed Transmission (HSTX) port at the board's head.
The Adafruit Feather RP2350 with HSTX and 8MB PSRAM is available to order on the company's store at $15.50 before volume discounts — a reasonable $3 premium over the standard version without PSRAM.