Waveshare Melds the Raspberry Pi Pico and Raspberry Pi Zero Families Into the RP2350-PiZero
Dev board borrows the layout of a Raspberry Pi Zero but puts a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller at its heart.
Embedded and hobbyist hardware specialist Waveshare has launched a board that unashamedly draws inspiration from two of Raspberry Pi's product lines, the Raspberry Pi Zero single-board computer family and the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 microcontroller development board: the RP2350-PiZero.
"RP2350-PiZero is a high-performance and cost-effective microcontroller board designed by Waveshare," the company says of its latest hardware design, "[with] onboard DVI interface, TF [TransFlash/SD Card] card slot and PIO [Programmable Input/Output]-USB port, compatible with [the[ Raspberry Pi 40-pin GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] header, with reserved solder pads for PSRAM [Pseudo-Static RAM] chip expansion, easy to develop and integrate into products."
The form factor of the Waveshare RP2350-PiZero, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is, as the name suggests, designed to mimic the Raspberry Pi Zero family of single-board computers — complete with a 40-pin GPIO header to the upper edge and with mounting points in the same places. Rather than an application-class system-on-chip, though, the part at its heart is a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller — the company's second-generation in-house design, and the successor to the RP2040.
The RP2350B gives the user a choice of any two cores from a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 with digital signal processor (DSP) and cryptographic accelerators and a pair of free and open-source RISC-V-based Hazard3 cores, all running at up to 150MHz. There's 520kB of RAM, with the possibility for expansion via optional PSRAM modules, plus 16MB of off-chip flash storage expandable via microSD Card.
Where a Raspberry Pi Zero has two micro-USB ports, the RP2350-PiZero has two USB Type-C ports — one for programming and power and the other as a USB 1.1 Device or Host port driven by the microcontroller's programmable input/output (PIO) blocks. An HDMI-compatible connector carries a DVI signal for connection to external monitors, and there's a JST connector for an optional external battery.
The RP2350-PiZero is now available on the Waveshare store, priced at $9.99 before volume discounts.