Waveshare RP2350-Plus Development Board, Dual-Core, WiFi-Ready USB-C

The Waveshare RP2350-Plus is a Pico-style development board built around the Raspberry Pi RP2350A chip, notable for its genuinely unusual dual-architecture design: the chip combines an Arm Cortex-M33 core with a RISC-V Hazard3 core on the same silicon, running at up to 150MHz, giving developers a choice of instruction set architecture for their firmware rather than being locked into one. That flexibility is a real point of difference from the original RP2040-based Pico, which offered only Arm cores.

Memory is a genuine step up as well: 520KB of SRAM and 4MB of onboard flash, both considerably more than the original Pico's 264KB SRAM and 2MB flash, giving real headroom for larger applications, buffered sensor data, or more complex firmware than the original Pico comfortably handled. A USB Type-C connector supports both device and host roles, modernizing the connector choice over the Micro-USB found on many earlier Pico-family boards.

Power management includes an MP28164 DC-DC buck-boost chip supporting up to 2A load current, plus a header specifically for lithium battery charge and discharge, making the board considerably more battery-project-friendly out of the box than a bare Pico would be without added power circuitry. 26 multi-function GPIO pins are exposed, backed by 2 SPI, 2 I2C, 2 UART, 4 ADC channels, 16 PWM channels, and 12 Programmable I/O (PIO) state machines, the PIO count alone exceeding the original Pico's 8, giving more room for custom peripheral protocols implemented in software.

An onboard temperature sensor, accurate clock and timer peripherals, and accelerated floating-point libraries round out the hardware feature set, and like other RP-series boards, it supports drag-and-drop programming via USB mass storage, plus sleep and dormant low-power modes for battery-conscious applications. Developers who've outgrown the original Pico's memory or peripheral count, or who specifically want the option to target either Arm or RISC-V firmware from the same board, will find the RP2350-Plus a genuinely more capable upgrade path.