DFRobot's Tiny Beetle Board Family Grows Bigger with the Beetle RP2350
Breadboard-friendly compact development board range now gains Raspberry Pi's latest dual-core microcontroller.
Embedded and hobbyist electronics specialist DFRobot has added a new model to its Beetle range of compact development boards, building on its earlier Beetle RP2040 with a model based on Raspberry Pi's second-generation in-house microcontroller: the Beetle RP2350.
"The Beetle RP2350 is a coin-sized, high-performance development board powered by [the] Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller," the company writes of its latest development board. "It's perfect for space-constrained applications like wearables, smart home devices, and industrial IoT [Internet of Things]. With built-in lithium battery management, 11 accessible IOs [Inputs/Outputs], and support for C/C++, MicroPython, and Arduino, it combines portability, efficiency, and ease of use—making it the ultimate solution for compact, power-efficient designs."
At the heart of the Beetle RP2350, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is exactly what its name implies: a Raspberry Pi RP2350, the company's second-generation successor to the popular RP2040 microcontroller. Featuring an unusual dual-architecture design, this includes two Arm Cortex-M33 cores alongside two free and open-source Hazard3 RISC-V cores, all running at up to 150MHz, and allows the users to pick any two to be active at any given time. There's 520kB of static RAM (SRAM), with DFRobot adding 2MB of on-board flash for program storage.
Like its predecessor the Beetle RP2040, launched three years ago, the Beetle RP2350 is designed around a small footprint of just 25×20.5mm (around 0.98×0.81"), though ditches the unusual large-format solder pads for more traditional unpopulated 0.1"-spaced breadboard-friendly castellated general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins brought out at either side. There's an on-board charging module for an option lithium battery, USB Type-C connectivity for power and data, and physical boot-mode and reset switches.
DFRobot has put the Beetle RP2350 up for sale on its store at just $4.90, the same price as its earlier Espressif ESP32-C6-based Beetle and two dollars less than the original Beetle RP2040.s
