Adafruit Unveils a Work-in-Progress Raspberry Pi RP2350B Single-Board Computer, the "Fruit Jam"

UPDATE (3/3/2025): Adafruit has finalized the board design for the Fruit Jam, a Raspberry Pi RP2350B-powered single-board computer inspired by Programming Club Network's IchigoJam family of educational gadgets.

Images of the board, labeled on the silkscreen as the "RP2350 Fruit Jam Mini Comp," are now available on a product listing on the Adafruit web store — but, at the, time of writing, no launch date or pricing had yet been announced.

Interested parties can sign up to be notified when the board goes up for sale on the official product page.

Original article continues below.

Adafruit has announced a work-in-progress single-board computer, powered by the dual-architecture quad-core Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller and featuring "a ridonkulous amount of hardware:" the Fruit Jam.

"We were catching up on a recent [interview] with Eben Upton and learned some fun facts: such as [that] the DVI hack for the RP2040 was inspired by a device called the IchigoJam," Adafruit's Phillip Torrone explains. "We remember reading about this back when it was an LPC1114, now it uses an RP2040. Well, we’re wrapping up the Metro RP2350, and lately, we’ve been joking around that with DVI output and USB Host support via bit-banged PIO, you could sorta build a little stand-alone computer."

Adafruit's indirect inspiration was the IchigoJam family of devices created by Japanese educational coding concern Programming Club Network (PCN) as low-cost microcomputers for educational projects, and most recently upgraded to feature a Raspberry Pi Pico and its dual-core RP2040 microcontroller. Where the IchigoJam wears a specific fruit on its sleeve, though, having been named for the Japanese word for "strawberry," Adafruit has taken the alternative approach of covering all bases with its own "Fruit Jam" moniker as a temporary placeholder that may end up proving popular enough for permanent use.

While sharing a similar credit card-sized footprint, the Fruit Jam isn't designed as a competitor for the mainstream Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers. Instead, like the IchigoJam, it uses a modern microcontroller where a vintage microcomputer would have opted for an at-the-time cutting-edge microprocessor — taking advantage of the march of technological progress to deliver a digital video output, two-from-four RISC-V or Arm Cortex-M33 processor cores running at up to 150MHz, 520kB of static RAM (SRAM) plus 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), 16MB of flash storage plus microSD Card expansion, USB Host support, give on-board NeoPixel RGB LEDs and three buttons, STEMMA QT I2C and STEMMA Classic expansion, EYESPI connector for TFT displays, a 16-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, an HDMI-compatible DVI video output driven by the RP2350B's High-Speed Transmission (HSTX) port, and even a mono speaker and stereo headphone jack.

"With the extra pins of the QFN-80 [Raspberry Pi] RP2350B [microcontroller], we're able to jam a ridonkulous amount of hardware into this shape," Torrone explains of the impressive feature list. "The PSRAM will help when we want to do things like run emulations that we need to store in fast RAM access, and it will also let us use the main SRAM as the DVI video buffer. When we get the PCBs back and assembled, what should we try running on this hardware? We're pretty sure it can run [id Software's] DOOM. Should that be first?"

More information is available on the Adafruit blog; no release date or pricing has yet been announced.