The $20 Clintech Pico Unleashes the RP2350’s Full Potential
Supercharge your projects with the $20 Clintech Pico: a Pico 2-sized beast packing 48 GPIOs and dual-architecture RP2350 power.
The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is inexpensive, powerful, accessible, and loaded with features, which makes it one of the best microcontroller development boards around for makers. But what can you do when your project grows too large for this board? The 26 onboard GPIOs go a long way, but eventually everyone is going to find that they need more.
The RP2350 chips that power these boards actually offer up to 48 GPIO pins — they simply are not all broken out on a Pico 2. But now a new development board created by Clintech has unleashed this extra capacity. The Clintech Pico Board, powered by an RP2354B microcontroller, has a Pico 2 form factor, but with 48 available GPIOs.
While it maintains compatibility with the familiar Raspberry Pi Pico footprint, the Clintech Pico significantly extends functionality by adding extra through-holes that break out the remaining pins — along with access to the QSPI interface for external memory.
The board is powered by the RP2354B system-on-chip from Raspberry Pi. This chip offers a high level of flexibility, featuring both dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 processors and dual-core RISC-V Hazard3 cores, each capable of running at up to 150 MHz. Developers can choose between running two Arm cores, two RISC-V cores, or a hybrid configuration with one of each — opening the door to experimentation across architectures on a single device.
Memory and storage are also strong points for a board of this size. The Pico Board includes 520 KB of on-chip SRAM and 2 MB of integrated flash memory. For more demanding applications, users can connect up to 16 MB of external QSPI flash or PSRAM through dedicated breakout points — an especially useful feature for data-heavy or real-time processing tasks.
The additional GPIO access is particularly valuable for advanced embedded projects involving sensors, displays, robotics, or parallel interfaces. With three programmable I/O (PIO) blocks and 12 state machines, the board is well-suited for custom protocols and timing-sensitive applications.
By preserving the Pico 2’s compact 51 x 21 mm form factor while dramatically expanding its I/O capabilities, the Clintech Pico Board offers a compelling upgrade path for developers who have outgrown the limitations of standard Pico designs — without sacrificing compatibility or ease of use. You can pick one up for $20 on Tindie.