Adafruit Launches the Metro RP2350 — and Adds a High-End Variant with 8MB of PSRAM
Delayed Arduino UNO form factor board has finally hit the market, and is available with 16MB of QSPI flash and optional 8MB QSPI PSRAM.
Adafruit's delayed Metro RP2350 — a microcontroller board that puts Raspberry Pi's latest chip into an Arduino UNO-compatible form factor — is out now, and comes with an added bonus: the option to add 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), for projects where 528kB of SRAM just isn't enough.
"Choo! Choo! This is the RP2350 Metro Line, making all station stops at 'Dual [Arm] Cortex-M33 mountain,' '528K RAM round-about,' and '16 Megabytes of Flash town' and a bonus stop at "8 Megabytes of PSRAM village,'" the company writes of its latest development board. "This train is piled high with hardware that complements the Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip to make it an excellent development board for projects that want Arduino-shape-compatibility or just need the extra space and debugging ports."
Adafruit announced the Metro RP2350 back in August last year, shortly after Raspberry Pi launched the chip alongside its Raspberry Pi Pico 2 microcontroller board. Featuring a user-selectable choice of Arm Cortex-M33 cores or free and open Hazard3 RISC-V cores plus a generous 528kB of RAM, the chip offers some tempting upgrades over its predecessor the RP2040 — and it's easy to see why Adafruit and others chose to build boards around it.
The Metro RP2350, though, hit a few speedbumps along the way. Adafruit's plan to launch a high-end board that mimics the footprint and pinout of the popular Arduino UNO family was stymied by a lack of available general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins on the chip — leading to a decision in November to redesign the board around the RP2350B, a larger version with more GPIO.
Now, that board is available to buy in two variants, both of which share the same Arduino UNO-inspired pinout and core functionality including a microSD Card slot, flat flexible circuit (FFC) connector for the chip's high-speed transmission (HSTX) port, STEMMA QT port for solder-free expansion, and USB Type-C connectivity for power and data. The first is the base Metro RP2350, which comes with 16MB of quad-SPI flash; the second is an expanded version that also adds quad-SPI pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), available alongside the RP2350B's on-board 528kB SRAM.
Both variants are now available to order from the Adafruit store, priced at $24.95 for the base model and $27.95 for the version with 8MB of PSRAM respectively; volume discounts are available on both models, starting at 10 units.
