Adafruit Prepares to Launch the Feather RP2350 with HSTX Port
A Raspberry Pi RP2350, 8MB of flash, room for PSRAM, STEMMA QT, battery, debug, and even an HSTX port — just watch erratum E9.
Adafruit is preparing to launch a Raspberry Pi RP2350 Feather-format development board with an interesting extra feature: a flat flexible circuit (FFC) connector at one end to provide access to the microcontroller's high-speed transmission (HSTX) port.
"[The] RP2350 flies high with the Feather format — now you can use any FeatherWings with this battery-powered dev board," Adafruit says of its latest hardware design. "It comes with 8MB of flash, 22-pin HSTX output port, STEMMA QT, debug SWD [Serial Wire Debug], and optional PSRAM [Pseudo-Static RAM] spot. It's our first RP2350 board and we crammed a ton of goodies into our classic Feather format. It's an excellent starter board to go along with your Pico 2."
The Raspberry Pi RP2350 was unveiled, alongside the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, early last month as a follow-up to the popular RP2040. Still designed in-house by Raspberry Pi's chip team, the RP2350 boasts both Arm Cortex-M33 and open-source Hazard3 RISC-V cores, expanded Programmable Input/Output (PIO) blocks, nearly twice the memory, and support for external PSRAM where required.
It also has something missing from the RP2040: a high-speed transmission (HSTX) peripheral. This, as the name implies, provides a means to transmit data at a high rate without tying up the PIO blocks or a CPU core — providing an easy way to drive a digital display, among other potential use-cases. Adafruit's Feather RP2350 brings this out to a 22-pin FFC connector at one end, making it easy to access — while also bringing out other general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, including four analog pins, to breadboard-friendly headers pin-compatible with other Feather boards.
Elsewhere on the board are a user-addressable red LED and an RGB led, a STEMMA QT connector for solderless expansion, a JST SH Serial Wire Debug header compatible with the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe, and a 200mA charging circuit for an optional lithium-polymer battery. There's 8MB of flash, and a footprint for an optional PSRAM chip — though, at the time of writing, Adafruit had not yet announced a version with this populated.
The Adafruit Feather RP2350 with HSTX Port is listed on the official store at $12.50, though at the time of writing was showing as out-of-stock; purchasers are advised that, like all other RP2350 boards, it's affected by erratum RP2350-E9, and will require strong external pull-down resistors owing to a hardware flaw affecting the internal pull-downs.