I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller

Since their release a few years ago, the Raspberry Pi Pico, and its successor, the Pico 2, have quickly become the favorite microcontroller development boards of electronics hobbyists everywhere. Between being dirt cheap, very well supported, and massively overclockable, there is an awful lot to love. But sometimes a project may need just a little bit more oomph than a Pico board can provide.

For cases such as these, Josh from the Signal Drift channel on YouTube has come up with a nice solution. He has designed a new development board called the Pico Stretch that is a drop-in replacement for a Pico 2, but that is not all that it is. As the name implies, the Stretch has a longer form factor, and that extra space was used well.

Josh used the extra real estate to pack in an additional 24 GPIO pins, 8MB of PSRAM, and a Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2 for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. As expected, the board sports a powerful RP2350 microcontroller. There is also 16MB of flash storage available, a USB-C connector, exposed pads to access the PSRAM and radio module, and both boot and reset buttons.

To demonstrate the board’s compatibility with the Pico 2, Josh plugged the Stretch into a PicoCalc and loaded it with stock firmware. Unsurprisingly, it operated exactly like an official Raspberry Pi board would. Josh also ran a web server on the Stretch to demonstrate its extra power and wireless connectivity that could come in handy for a wide range of projects.

The design files are available on GitHub for those that want to have their own Stretch board produced. Be sure to check out the video to see the board in action. Wait a minute… have I been saying “Pico” wrong all these years?