Olimex Opens Orders for Its Raspberry Pi RP2350-Powered PICO2-XL and PICO2-XXL
Open-hardware board designs pack 48 general-purpose input/output pins, up to 16MB of flash, and up to 8MB of PSRAM.
Bulgarian open hardware specialist Olimex has begun taking orders for the PICO2-XL and PICO2-XXL, its beefier takes on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 — delivering a board that breaks out all 48 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins of the RP2350 microcontroller in exchange for breadboard incompatibility.
"[The] Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is great," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov wrote when he unveiled the PICO2-XXL design back in November 2024, "but we decided to make our own version with some improvements. We wanted to expose all 48 GPIOs of [the] RP2350B. [Use a] USB-C connector which allows more power to be sourced from the host. Add BOOT and RESET buttons."
The resulting board is undeniably chunkier than the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 which inspired it, with two rows of 0.1" pin headers down each side — a design decision that allows enough room to bring out all 48 GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi RP2350 at the board's heart, but which will not allow it to operate in a solderless breadboard without leaving half the pin headers unpopulated.
The change goes beyond just the PCB, too: the PICO2-XXL uses USB Type-C connectivity instead of micro-USB, includes both QWIIC/STEMMA QT and UEXT headers for solderless expansion, and bumps the QSPI-connected flash chip from 4MB to 16MB while adding 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) to go along with the 520kB of SRAM already on the microcontroller. There's even a microSD Card slot for storage.
For those who don't need the extra RAM, and who can get away with less storage, Olimex has also launched the PICO2-XL. This shares the same footprint as the PICO2-XXL, but drops down to juts 2MB of flash, drops the PSRAM altogether, and shaves off the microSD Card slot — delivering a slimmer layout, which Usunov says is easier to mount flush to another board.
Olimex is now testing the new boards, and has opened orders on its official web store at just €5 for the PICO2-XL and €9 for the PICO2-XXL; shipping is expected to begin on 17 January 2025. As always, the board design files are available on GitHub under the Strongly Reciprocal variant of the CERN Open Hardware License 2.
