Olimex Unveils Its Beefier Take on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 — and the Ultimate USB-Serial Adapter
Open hardware specialist unveils the work-in-progress PICO2-XXL, bringing out 48 GPIO pins and adding 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM, and microSD.
Bulgarian open source hardware specialist Olimex has unveiled a pair of new Raspberry Pi RP2350B-based microcontroller development boards, designed for those who find the number of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 not quite enough — and has also launched what it claims is "the world's most sophisticated USB to serial converter," the USB-SERIAL-L.
"[The] Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is great," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov explains of his two latest open-hardware microcontroller development board designs, "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."
Those aren't the only changes to the board, which uses the larger variant of Raspberry Pi's second-generation in-house RP2350 microcontroller chip — delivering two Arm Cortex-M33 cores and two open-source Hazard3 RISC-V cores, of which the user can pick any two to be running at any given time, plus 520kB of static RAM. On the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, this is normally paired with 4MB quad-SPI flash — but in the Olimex PICO2-XXL, as the new board is known, it's replaced with a more generation 16MB of flash and 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM).
Other improvements on the board include the addition of an on-board microSD card controller and slot for easy storage expansion, a four-pin Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for solderless expansion, and — as you'd expect from an Olimex board — the company's traditional UEXT expansion connector. The expanded GPIOs are brought out to two rows of 0.1" pin headers — which does, sadly, mean the board is not compatible with traditional breadboards.
Olimex has also unveiled what it claims to be "the world's most sophisticated USB to serial converter," the USB-SERIAL-L" — a compact board, which connects to a host over USB Type-C and delivers data rates from 30 bits per second (bps) to 3Mbps, includes the often-ignored CTS and RTS signal pins, and boasts a buffered output that can be adjusted from as low as 0.65V up to 5.5V — "which makes it possible to interface [with] any processor," Usunov points out, "SoC, or FPGA."
The USB-SERIAL-L is available on the Olimex store now at €9.95 (around $10.50), with hardware design files available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3; the PICO2-XL will launch in December at €9 (around $10.50), Usunov has confirmed, with a lower-cost variant featuring 2MB of flash and no PSRAM available at just €5 (around $5.30).