Today I received the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board. This is the development board of the RP2350 chip released by Raspberry Pi in August, from the Bear Pi. It is said that the number of RP2350 in China is still small, so I consider this an early bird experience.

Compared to the official Raspberry Pi Pico board, the Bear Pi version has the biggest change of replacing the Micro USB with a Type-C connector. In the image above, the left side is the Bear Pi Pico 2, and the right side is the first generation Raspberry Pi Pico board.

I checked the official Raspberry Pi website, and the official Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board still uses Micro USB, which is quite outdated.

Let’s take a look at the real face of the Raspberry Pi PR2350 chip.

As we all know, the Raspberry Pi Pico can be developed using MicroPython. However, when I plugged in the new board, there was no response, indicating that it did not have the Bootloader corresponding to the MicroPython interpreter. I searched the official website but couldn’t find it, and finally found the MicroPython uf2 file for the RP2350 chip in a GitHub repository from a user named pimoroni.

Next, it’s simple. Press and hold the BOOTSEL button on the board (the only button on the board), then use a USB cable to connect the board to the computer. This will create a new disk called PR2350 on the computer. Drag the downloaded UF2 file directly here. Then power it on again.

Reconnect the board to the computer via USB (this time without pressing BOOTSEL), open Thonny software, and you will see the MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico) USB serial device displayed at COM12 in the lower right corner.

Now we can start programming. The first line for beginners is to print Hello World.

The first thing an embedded engineer does with a board is to light an LED, so I will also light one up. I found the document raspberry-pi-pico-python-sdk.pdf on the Raspberry Pi official website.

Then I flipped through the document to find the example code for lighting up the LED. First, run the first two lines to initialize the corresponding GPIO as output, and then call led.value(1) in the console to output a high level to this pin, thereby lighting up the LED.

from machine import Pin, Timer
led = Pin("LED", Pin.OUT)
time = Timer()
def tick(timer):    global led        led.toggle()  time.init(freq=10, mode=Timer.PERIODIC, callback=tick

Using the above code, the LED will blink at a frequency of 5Hz.

The effect is quite good.

After all, with a 150MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-M33 microcontroller, if the LED doesn’t light up, it must be an issue with the code I copied and pasted. I hope to use this board to create something fun in the future!