Introducing Raspberry Pi Pico 2
Introducing Raspberry Pi Pico 2
We’re happy to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our second-generation microcontroller board, built on RP2350: a new high-performance, secure microcontroller designed here at Raspberry Pi.
With a higher core clock speed, twice the memory, more powerful Arm cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature uplift, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Pico series.
Pico 2 is on sale now, priced at $5.
RP2350 specs:
- Two 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores, with floating point and DSP support
- 520KB of on-chip SRAM in ten concurrently accessible banks
- A comprehensive security architecture, built around Arm TrustZone for Cortex-M, and including:
- Signed boot support
- 8KB of on-chip antifuse one-time-programmable (OTP) memory
- SHA-256 acceleration
- A hardware true random number generator (TRNG)
- An on-chip switch-mode power supply and low-quiescent-current LDO
- Twelve upgraded PIO state machines
- A new HSTX peripheral for high-speed data transmission
- Support for external QSPI PSRAM
Looking pretty good. I especially like the security features.
Not really a fan of putting secure boot on. The only purpose that serves is locking the customers out of their purchased hardware. Raspberry Pi is clearly not targeting the maker market with those changes, they want that corporate money and are willing to stick the finger to hackers and makers in the process. Can't make custom firmware if you can't boot it.
That's usually not how secure boot is configured on microcontrollers. They usually come with no code installed and an unsigned bootloader, and therefore no barrier for you to flash what you want on it.
In fact, the STM32 has secure boot, and it's still one of the most popular microcontrollers for makers and hackers. That's because the secure boot feature is there for developers, hackers and makers to use if they want to.
RISC-V support is nice. I like the idea of being able to work as both an ARM and a RISC-V microcontroller while sharing the same array of peripherals.
Did they ever fire that cop?
He's not listed on the team-section of the raspberry website, but he shows up as the resident maker in blog posts as late as Feb. 2024.
So for security reasons I'll just assume he's still there.
Fun fact, Raspberry Pi OS sends (or at least used to - I can't imagine they've toned it down) a unique ID to Raspberry Pi foundation that identifies your hardware.
Badass. Thanks for letting me know.