Earle F. Philhower, III Brings the Arduino Pico Core to V4.0.1, Adds RP2350 and Pico 2 Support
New release lets you program boards built around Raspberry Pi's latest chip in the Arduino IDE.
Developer Earle F. Philhower, III has released version 4.0.1 of his Arduino Core for the Raspberry Pi Pico family — bringing with it support for the newly-launched Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and its RP2350 chip.
"This is a major release with support for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (RP2350) using [the] new SDK [Software Development Kit] 2.0.0," Philhower explains of the latest release. "New RP2350-based boards from iLabs, Solder Party, and SparkFun are supported in addition to the Pico 2. The full 512k of RAM and up to 8MB of PSRAM [Pseudo-Static RAM] are available for applications to use."
Philhower's Raspberry Pi Pico Arduino Core, designed to add the ability to program the Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP2040-based development boards using the Arduino IDE and with the familiar Wiring library, was launched back in March 2021 — beating official support to the punch. Offering an alternative to programming the microcontroller in straight C/C++ or MicroPython, the Core has proven popular — and is now extended to include the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and its unusual dual-architecture RP2350 chip, albeit only in Arm mode for now.
"Special thanks to arturo182 for a great code review that helped get a working RP2350 build even before I had any chips in hand," Philhower says of those who made the release possible, "and to Pontus [Oldberg], [Kevin Santo Cappuccio], and [Kird D. Benell] for kindly supplying chips and boards before I could even order them here in the US."
The latest core, version 4.0.0, includes support for the two Arm Cortex-M33 cores of the Raspberry Pi RP2350 — but not yet the free and open source Hazard3 RISC-V cores that sit alongside them on the chip, usable either on their own or with the Arm cores in a 1/1 split. "Everything that worked on the RP2040 should work on the RP2350," Philhower says, "except for FreeRTOS ([which] requires use of a private [Raspberry Pi] fork of the upstream we use) and OTA [Over The Air] ([which] requires me to understand the new bootup sequence better. SPI, I2C, LittleFS, EEPROM, PWMAudio, LWIP-based networking, multicore, SDK USB and TinyUSB, and more have been verified."
Officially confirmed as supported in the new release are the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and boards from three third-party vendors: the Invector Labs Challenger RP2350 BConnect and Invector Labs Challenger RP2350 WiFi/BLE; the SparkFun ProMicro RP2350; and the Solder Party RP2350 Stamp and Solder Party RP2350 Stamp XL. The new release also brings support for the WIZnet W6100 Ethernet controller, ahead of the company's release of Ethernet-equipped Raspberry Pi Pico 2-style development boards.
More information is available on the project's GitHub repository, where the source code is made available under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1.