Pimoroni Pips Raspberry Pi to the Post with the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Board

Sheffield, UK-based hobbyist electronics specialist Pimoroni has launched its answer to the yet-to-be-announced Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, combining the RP2350 quad-core dual-architecture microcontroller with a surprise bonus component: the Raspberry Pi RM2 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio module.

"We adore the versatility and value of Raspberry Pi Pico but we also enjoy a souped up RP2350 board with all the extras baked in," Pimoroni writes of its latest board design. "With Pimoroni Pico boards, we've tried to cram in as much extra functionality as we possibly can whilst keeping to the original Pico footprint to maintain compatibility with existing Pico add-ons."

Pimoroni's Pico Plus 2 W is, as the name suggests, designed to be an enhanced alternative to the official Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, with one little twist: the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W doesn't exist yet. The cat, however, would appear to be out of the bag: Pimoroni's new board uses the Raspberry Pi RM2, an in-house single-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module that will almost certainly be found on the first-party Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W — when it's announced, anyway.

Elsewhere on the board is 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) and 16MB of flash, which expand the 520kB of static RAM (SRAM) on the RP2350 microcontroller itself. The chip's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are brought out to breadboard- and surface-mount-friendly castellated headers on either side, as with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, and there's a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for solderless expansion — plus a Serial Wire Debug (SWD) header and physical reset and boot-mode buttons, the latter of which can double as user-configurable input.

The RP2350 is, of course, Raspberry Pi's latest in-house microcontroller, and the company's follow-up to the popular RP2040. The design includes a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 cores with double-precision floating-point accelerators and a pair of free and open source Hazard3 RISC-V cores — and you can use any two, mixing and matching the RISC-V and Arm cores, as you desire.

The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W is now available on the Pimoroni store, priced at $18.62; at the time of writing, Raspberry Pi had yet to announce the RM2 radio module — and neither had it announced the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a device that is now certain to launch in the very near future.