Adafruit Revisists the Metro RP2350, Makes the Move to the Bigger and Better Raspberry Pi RP2350B
A lack of pins on the Raspberry Pi RP2350A has led to a rethink, and the Metro RP2350 will now launch — a little late — with the RP2350B.
Adafruit has confirmed that its delayed Metro RP2350 microcontroller development board is on the way — and that's its received a complete overhaul, moving to the more powerful Raspberry Pi RP2350B chip for a broader feature set.
Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and its in-house RP2350 microcontroller back in early August as a powerful Arm- and RISC-V-powered successor to the popular Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040. The RP2350, though, wasn't a single microcontroller, but a family: the 60-pin part on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, the RP2350A, was to be joined by a larger 80-pin variant dubbed the RP2350B — with both also available as RP2354A and RP2354B variants boasting die-stacked flash memory.
Adafruit was one of the first to announce boards based around the Raspberry Pi RP2350, alongside Pimoroni, Seeed Studio, Solder Party, SparkFun, WIZnet, and others, confirming it was to bring the quad-core dual-architecture microcontroller to its gumstick Feather and Arduino UNO-inspired Metro form factors. It's the Metro, though, which is receiving a redesign — swapping to the bigger and, it seems, better RP2350B.
"We designed and prototyped an RP2350 Metro a few months ago, and it worked OK, but we were really short on pins, which meant a lot of annoying compromises," Adafruit's Phillip Torrone explains of the reason the RP2350-based model never launched, "so we ended up only fabbing the RP2350 Feather to start."
"We wanted to jam-pack this design," Torrone continues, "and with the extra GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output pins] on the [RP2350]B we have plenty of peripherals: the 22-pin HSTX for DVI output, Stemma QT port, NeoPixel, JST 3-SH SWD debug port, 16MB flash, an extra spot for PSRAM, microSD Card with SPI or SDIO connections, and 5V buck converter that can give us two amp[s] easily, which we’ll need since we also have a USB Host port pinout for connecting USB peripherals. We even managed to get a couple of niceties like switchable power for the USB host power, a USB boot button as user input, and an SD card detect GPIO."
While the Metro RP2350 had made it as far as a camera-ready pre-production prototype, though, the Metro RP2350B isn't quite so far along in the process: the company's announcement shows off the board design and a render, but there's not yet any actual hardware to see — nor has Adafruit confirmed pricing and availability.